


and whose army?

by renaissance



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cryptography, Dumbledore's Army, Espionage, Gen, Oxford, Politics, Second War with Voldemort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-10 01:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16460747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/pseuds/renaissance
Summary: It's 2005. The war against Voldemort is still being fought. Muggleborn and rendered wandless, Anthony lost contact with the magical world eight years ago. Now the war wants him back, whether he likes it or not.





	and whose army?

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [obscuro_2018](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/obscuro_2018) collection. 



> for a long time, i've wanted to write something where the DA got to be real revolutionaries. for obscuro, i took my chance and told that story through minor characters. now this has spawned a whole sprawling au; this is but the tip of the iceberg, and there's so much backstory and detail i couldn't fit in here that i'll almost certainly revisit this universe some day. (feel free to ask about things in the comments, though, because i won't get to it right away.)
> 
> before anyone asks, yes, [bertram aubrey](https://www.hp-lexicon.org/character/bertram-aubrey/) is a canon character. robert hilliard is pottermore canon but i'll give him a pass because i'm always on the lookout for more ravenclaws.
> 
> many thanks to jo for helping with ideas and the planning of the thing, mirrific on tumblr for help with oxfordian verisimilitude, and emma for beta reading, ideas, and yelling at anthony whenever... well, you'll see.

Frost clung to the windowpanes and caught the streetlight like sequins in the early evening gloom. It was February; winter’s last, vicious stand. The old brick buildings had central heating but Anthony’s office managed to be enduringly cold despite that. He stayed late most days because his dorm was in an even older, draftier building, and it was heated the way a paper was referenced in a footnote: with a functional radiator that had ceased functioning the moment the weather turned.

Nothing that a heating charm couldn’t have solved, but those days were behind him.

The office also had the advantage of a computer. Anthony had code running in the background and SimCity in the foreground to pass time in between computations, notebook open on his desk just in case someone came by and he had to look busy. The people in charge of the network still hadn’t twigged that everyone in the office had installed SimCity on their machines. It was that or talk to each other. Mathematicians did not chit-chat as a matter of course. They had communicated enough to work out which admin permissions to bypass in order to get SimCity running. That was as chatty as it got.

It wasn’t as though Anthony didn’t have friends, didn’t have people he could’ve been spending the night with instead of sitting in his chilly office running his code. But his thesis was due in a matter of months. You either did a DPhil or you had a social life. Anthony had made his choice.

This late at night, it was always just him. Anthony wasn’t the only person in the building who stayed late, though. There were academics grading assignments and cleaners doing their jobs. It wasn’t inconceivable that, at this time of night, there might be a knock on the door.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” Anthony said, absently minimising SimCity in what had become a reflexive action, the fluid motion of his hand to his mouse and his mouse pointer to the corner of the screen.

The handle turned. The door opened and someone followed. He was not anyone Anthony recognised—he was tallish and stately, greying at the temples but wearing it like a fashion. His suit was tweed and tailored; there was a silk scarf lying louchely about his neck. He must’ve had a coat elsewhere otherwise he’d freeze to death.

“Can I help you?”

“Can you help me,” the man said, amused. “You can help me more than you know, Anthony.”

Anthony would not let it alarm him. His photo was on the noticeboard alongside all the other postgrad students. He’d published a couple of papers in the field as first author. It was not inconceivable that a stranger might know who he was—but a stranger in the building after hours?

“Please, have a seat,” Anthony said, gesturing to the empty desk by his. He grabbed a pen and started flipping it between his fingers. Nervous energy. He didn’t like this.

The man looked at the seat like it had personally insulted the cut of his suit. “No, thank you, I would rather not. I like to keep these visits short.” He put his hand on the back of the chair and leant against it like it was a walking stick. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Bertram Aubrey. I work for the… government. Put simply, you are a very fine mathematician. Your work in cryptography has caught the attention of many interested parties. Some of us outside the field.”

The government. Theoretically, Anthony knew perfectly well there were people reading his papers. Cryptographers at other universities. Professors, postdocs, curious students. He had never been presented with tangible evidence of this outside of conversations at conferences. This was where his world began and ended, in the insular bubble of highly specialised academia. But outside the field—

“MI5,” Anthony guessed. Aubrey didn’t react. Anthony said, “Holy shit.”

“Good guess; you’re close. I’m from a special operations unit within MI5. One I established myself, as it happens. A group of people with a very particular set of skills.”

Anthony dropped his pen. “No.”

Aubrey pulled a wand out of his pocket. “Oh yes.”

“I can’t,” Anthony said. “If my work has—if you think I might be—you’ve got the wrong guy. I can’t be there right now. The—you know. Magical world.”

“Yes, it is rather fraught for those of us who’re Muggleborn,” Aubrey said. “I’m in exactly your position. However, I left the magical world long before this war. I left it during the last war, in fact, when it was just as dangerous for our kind. I studied at a Muggle university, just as you did. Cambridge.”

“And now you’re turning magic tricks for the Muggle government?” Anthony said. “I trust Blair more than I trust whichever puppet is at the head of the Ministry of Magic these days, but that’s not saying much. No offence. I feel like we could both do better than Queen and country.”

Aubrey smiled. It was not a kind smile. “You’re clever, Anthony. We need clever people on the team. My branch is made up entirely of people like you and me—wizards who would throw our wands out the window, given the chance. Which is exactly why we must do the work we do.”

“What is that work?”

“Keeping the peace,” Aubrey said. “Think about it.”

Anthony leant down to pick up his pen. He set it to one side on his desk. “You’re too late. I’ve already thrown out my wand.”

 

* * *

 

In fact, the Ministry had snapped his wand. They took him off the streets and put him in a room full of Muggleborns with a Portkey to Azkaban. Anthony had stood around a table with the other Muggleborns and their prison guard, their hands hovering over the Portkey, and it was at that moment that Anthony realised he would not go down easy. He had been in Dumbledore’s Army. He had fought back then; he would do it again. When the time came he did not touch the Portkey.

He was alone in the room. He had no wand but he had the element of surprise. He fought his way out of the Ministry of Magic with bloody knuckles and a fireplace poker he swung like a baseball bat. He ran until he could see Big Ben and the river, and he might have jumped in then and there, let the current carry him where it would. Instead he jumped the ticket gates and got the tube home and knocked on the door with his bloody knuckles until his parents let him in. He sat in his childhood bedroom and cried. The world that had been his home for six perfect years, the friends he’d made, the places and the people he’d fallen in love with—he would never see them again.

In the intervening years he’d tried to stay up to date with what was happening in the magical world, but it was a near impossibility when you had no way of getting there. Anthony was reduced to a conspiracy theorist, hanging around Whitehall for a glimpse of someone in robes, scanning radio frequencies and weird zines for some sign of a door that might open for him. In the meantime, he homeschooled himself and got his A-levels, got into Oxford, got into a DPhil. Studied maths and pretended it was arithmancy. That had been his best subject.

Anthony spent so long waiting for a breakthrough, some kind of sign that the war was over and that it was safe to come back. The sign never came. As far as he could tell the war went on. The Ministry fell and stayed fallen. Anthony gave up on waiting.

Now he lived in Wadham College in a room of his own. He worked on his thesis and responded to emails from his supervisors and tutored undergrads. He studied on the grounds or in the library or at the desk in his room. His desk was covered in draft papers covered in red pen markings. A new piece of paper had joined them in pride of place, right at the centre. It was a formal letter of invitation for Anthony to join MI5.

 

* * *

 

“What you’ve missed,” Aubrey said, as he handed Anthony the letter over coffee the next day, “is probably for your own good.”

They met on the proviso that Aubrey would tell Anthony everything. Unreservedly. It was a habitually half-empty kind of coffee shop but Aubrey had put up silencing charms nevertheless. He did it using wandless magic. Anthony was quietly jealous.

“I don’t care,” Anthony said. “Tell me.”

Aubrey nodded. “Very well.”

The story was this: Voldemort took over the Ministry and Harry Potter disappeared. Months passed, years. Potter never surfaced. Voldemort and his Death Eaters only grew in power. By now every known Muggleborn was either locked away, lost, or dead. (Anthony did not ask where his old friends counted among that number.) Hogwarts remained open under the iron fist of Headmaster Snape. The spell they used to detect children with magical powers no longer worked without the lineage—there were dozens of underage and untaught wizards running around in the ordinary world, lost.

There were rebel groups, of course. There would always be rebel groups under an authoritarian government. Aubrey’s wizarding special operations unit, SOW, kept track of them and the messages they were sending. MI5 wanted to destabilise Voldemort’s government as much as anyone else but by now it was widely believed that Voldemort had unspeakable dark magic keeping him alive. He was untouchable. MI5 worked with a group called the Order of the Phoenix, but the Order were not the problem. They were the old guard; veterans of the First War and happy to collaborate with the Muggle establishment in order to work towards equality and peace.

There was another group. If the Order were back streets and basements sort of underground, this lot were veritably subterranean. A scrappier, younger collection of freedom fighters doing their best. Doing the worst. A group too young to remember how it had been the first time but old enough to remember how it had been before the second. A group who, it was said, still had ties to Harry Potter.

Dumbledore’s Army.

“I believe you used to be involved with them, at Hogwarts,” Aubrey said.

“I was a member,” Anthony said plainly. “That doesn’t change things, does it?”

“On the contrary, it makes things much better for us. The DA have worked out a method of encrypting all of their communications. When we found out that one of their former number was working as a cryptographer, we knew we had to have you. What do you say?”

“I have to think about it.”

“I’d say take all the time you need,” Aubrey said, “but this is a war. Time is rather of the essence.”

“Give me until the weekend,” Anthony said. “I’ll get back to you with an answer on Saturday.”

“You can’t contact us the normal ways. No owls underground, and we have no access to the Floo Network, being outside the Ministry. I tell you what. If you decide to take up our offer, come to Thames House, Saturday morning. We’ll work something out.”

“What time?”

Aubrey gave Anthony a good, long look. “Just turn up. We’ll know.”

 

* * *

 

Anthony sat at his desk and turned the letter over in his hands. He had waited until Friday evening to open it. That way he had no time to ruminate too much on the decision—he knew the bones of it, and with any luck the letter would sway him one way or the other. Tomorrow morning was the deadline. Anthony would have to get down to London and he couldn’t Apparate without a wand. Hadn’t Apparated in years, anyway; probably wasn’t wise.

At the end of the day, it was a Muggle job. The letter was in a Muggle envelope with nothing written on it, and Muggle continuous paper with perforations along the edges where the side strips and adjoining pages had been torn off. It was typeset on a Muggle computer, in TeX. It could have been one of Anthony’s draft papers.

Anthony was no expert, but he imagined that most letters offering someone a job were short, prosaic, and formal. This was certainly formal; in the place of a letterhead, it said: _CLASSIFIED_ – _THIS LETTER WILL SELF-IMMOLATE UPON BEING FOLDED AGAIN_.

Automatic burn after reading. Now that Anthony remembered what he ought to be looking for, he felt it—magic at his fingertips like grabbing the sizzling handle of a car door in summer. The sensation alone was almost enough to convince him.

The letter itself sealed his fate.

_Anthony,_

_The information enclosed herein is confidential, for your eyes only. Below, accurate as of 27-12-04, is a list of all known members (marked with *_ _) and associates of the magical extremist group known as Dumbledore’s Army:_

 

* * *

 

The Oxford chill was almost entirely absent in London. Scarf weather was history and the city was crowded. If Anthony had time to spare in the afternoon, he’d brave the Tate.

He stood outside Thames House, waiting. The sun’s glare wore at his eyes like he’d been staring at the same letter for an hour before daring to put it away. There was magic in the air, swarming around him like the sensation of a piece of paper, folded in your hands, disappearing in a storm of sparks. Anthony stood by the river and shut his eyes. Against the backdrop of black he saw a list of names that he had done his utmost to commit to memory.

This was how Aubrey found him: with his eyes closed, discontent.

“We’re so glad you could make it,” Aubrey said. “Follow me.”

There was no secret entrance. They walked in through the front doors. Anthony expected to be signed on as a visitor, but there was already a staff pass with his name on it. He had to sign to pick it up. They went to a lift and Aubrey swiped his card, pressed a button to take them underground.

“I suppose I won’t even need a wand for this job,” Anthony said. It was the one thing weighing on his mind. But you could do cryptography without a wand. That was all they wanted him here to do. Intercept and decode.

“Not for now,” Aubrey said, “but in the long run, and your reintegration into our little microcosm of magical society, it would be beneficial. Luckily for you we have a wide selection of wands for you to choose from.”

“Here?”

What Anthony meant was, now? So soon?

The lift reached their floor and the doors opened with a ding.

“Here,” Aubrey said.

It could’ve been any Muggle office. An open-plan space with a glass-walled cubicle to one side, an empty desk, where presumably Aubrey sat. It could’ve been any Muggle office except for the paper plane memos flying about between the computers, the chalk that wrote on a blackboard of its own devices, the wireless softly playing a Celestina Warbeck song.

“Turn that shit off,” Aubrey said. “We have a new member of staff joining us today.”

There were eight desks in the office; six employees, and two spare. All six heads turned and fixed Anthony with curious looks. Anthony recognised one of them—Robert Hilliard, who’d been a Ravenclaw prefect when he was in first year. There were only two women among the lot of them. It might’ve been his imagination, but they in particular did not look pleased to see Anthony, and he probably wouldn’t blame them. Like the maths department, this was a boy’s club.

“This is Anthony Goldstein,” Aubrey continued. Robert gave a nod of recognition. “He is currently pursuing a doctorate in mathematics at Oxford, specialising in cryptography. In addition to that, he was a member of Dumbledore’s Army in its initial incarnation, in 1995.”

Anthony noted the way this was presented as new information. Aubrey had spoken of _we_ when he recruited Anthony, but it was evident now he meant _I_.

“Anthony is, at present, wandless, so that is our first order of business. I expect you all to be patient with him as he relearns magic. Until he is sufficiently proficient with his new wand, he will be working in the office on decoding various transmissions and messages we pick up.”

That was news to Anthony. He hadn’t expected to ever leave his new desk. Aubrey was clever—he’d known exactly how to lure Anthony in, and already the rules of engagement were beginning to change. There was no way Anthony could leave now.

He left his things at one of the spare desks, in a bank with Robert and the younger of the two women. Then, he followed Aubrey to the store room. This was almost half the size of the office, and its shelves were stacked with parchment and printer paper, ink for both, Muggle office supplies, staplers nestled between sneakoscopes and boxes wrapped in old editions of the Daily Prophet. At the back, there was a shelf floor to ceiling with wands.

“Where did you get all of these?” Anthony asked.

Aubrey shrugged. “Ollivander’s was raided soon after You-Know-Who took over the Ministry. The man himself was kidnapped—still missing, by the way—but they left the wands behind, which were subsequently looted by the Order. We have a working relationship. The Order have kindly donated a supply to us, for the sake of anonymity on our occasional sojourns into the magical world. But, as you’re wandless, I want you to let one of the wands choose you, and keep it.”

Anthony’s first wand had been short and springy, unicorn hair in the core and larch for its wood. He still remembered his visit to Ollivander’s shop. It had only taken three tries to find the wand for him. Ollivander said that it was remarkable for a wand to take to its owner so quickly. Privately, Anthony thought it was more likely that, being wide-eyed and Muggleborn, he was just easy to please.

His new wand was long. The box said twelve and a half inches. It was made of a handsome cedar with a phoenix tailfeather as the core. The box said _rigid_ but when he waved it for the first time, it didn’t feel too stiff or too springy. It just felt _right_.

This was after half an hour of stuffing around with SOW’s entire, diverse collection. Not so easy to please anymore, was he?

“Most of these wands have been on at least a couple of missions before,” Aubrey said. He turned the cedar wand’s box over in his hands. “Not this one. I don’t recognise its serial number from the logs.”

“You memorise all the serial numbers?”

“In the logs,” Aubrey said, “yes. A well-honed memory is as important a skill as duelling in our profession. If you don’t have any natural propensity in that direction, I can teach you some techniques. But you’re a mathematician. I rather think you at least have a head for numbers.”

Anthony did have a head for numbers, but he didn’t like being read so well. “I’ll work on my memory,” he said.

“Good lad. I’ll leave you and your new arm to get acquainted.”

Then Anthony was alone in the store room. From outside, Aubrey turned off the lights. “Bastard,” Anthony said under his breath; he heard Aubrey’s laugh in response and his footsteps as he walked away.

There was something to be said for the way darkness sharpened your other senses. Anthony shut his eyes and focused on the way the wand felt in his hand, the smoothness and grooves of the wood, the weight, the resistance as he moved it through the air. It was almost eight years since Anthony had last held his wand. He’d known the cedar wand was the one for him because it was the first one he tried that took the place of his phantom limb.

Some things, you never forgot. Anthony waved the wand and whispered, “ _Lumos_.” He opened his eyes to the light.

 

* * *

 

Anthony learnt two things about SOW that afternoon: that everyone there, with the exception of Aubrey, was younger than 35, and that, including Aubrey, they were all Ravenclaws.

“Aubrey likes to keep a tight-knit group,” explained Innogen, the woman whose desk was next to Anthony’s. She had graduated the year before he started at Hogwarts. “Most of the Muggles in MI5 went to university together. For us, the thing that keeps us loyal is our house.”

“He told me you were all wizards who didn’t care for the magical world,” Anthony said.

Innogen shrugged. “After a fashion. We wouldn’t be able to do this work if we cared for it too much, would we?”

“None of us are purebloods,” Robert said. “Half, at most, but from Muggle-leaning families. None of us have particularly strong ties to the whole shebang.”

SOW was established in 1983, a few years after the Boy Who Lived lived. The legend had passed down among the employees: Bertram Aubrey, a young MI5 recruit who had recently left the magical world behind, was sent undercover by his supervisor, a squib, to see how things were going in the Ministry of Magic. To their horror, there were no provisions in place for security or intelligence—as Innogen put it, “the ramshackle nature of the whole edifice that drove us back to the Muggle world in the first place.” Aubrey and his supervisor then established a special operations unit to keep an eye on the Ministry and the magical world at large, not on behalf of the insular magical community but the entire country in which that community pretended to hide.

Now, the magical world was a bigger mess than ever. Their “squabble over blood purity,” as Robert put it, was starting to spill out into the rest of Britain. Voldemort’s attacks on Muggleborns were also attacks on Muggles. Retaliation—from the DA and the Order both—only hit its target some of the time. The situation had to be kept under control. Someone had to keep the peace.

It was disconcerting to hear the war spoken about in such clinical terms, when Anthony had seen its face first hand. But then, he supposed, so had the agents of SOW. And it wasn’t like they were so detached from the whole thing. They had informants in the Order and in the Ministry. Now, they had Anthony to help monitor the DA. They were certain they would bring down Voldemort’s regime.

It was just taking a little longer than expected.

 

* * *

 

Most of the time, Anthony would be working remotely. He still needed to finish his DPhil, after all. But Aubrey had apparently had _words_ with his supervisor, which was news to Anthony, especially as he’d only been in the job a few days when he discovered this. Aubrey had said something like, Anthony’s thesis is nearly finished. We’ve given him a position at MI5—no words were minced there. He’ll be keeping irregular hours now. Thank you for understanding.

As Anthony understood it, nobody but his supervisor had been informed of this. That did not explain why everyone in his office was looking at him funny now. It was almost as though, now that magic was back in his life even this little bit, he had gone back entirely. He was no longer one of them and they could tell.

Aubrey had lent him a book: _A Practical Return to Magic for the Wayward Wizard_. At night, Anthony took the book out from under all the papers on his desk and worked through it methodically. He found the basics startlingly easy—setting up protective spells such that his Muggle neighbours wouldn’t have cause for alarm, casting simple charms, transfiguring small objects. Bigger transfigurations and defensive magic were harder; nothing that wouldn’t come in time, though. The book had a whole section on plants and their uses but Anthony had always been pants at potions and herbology. If he ever needed those skills again, he’d look them up.

Tonight, he had another project for homework. It was sealed in an unmarked envelope, which may as well have been SOW’s calling card. Printed on normal paper, but had the air of being transcribed from parchment. This was a DA message, intercepted. It came with a note from Aubrey, paperclipped to the top: _14/2/05 – intercepted this morning in South London. Looks like a love note but can’t be certain?_

Oh, Anthony realised, it was Valentine’s Day. He hadn’t even noticed.

The letter was written in symbols. Anthony guessed there would be a spell that returned those symbols to the Roman alphabet, and then there would be a simple cypher encoding the words. Or not so simple, depending on who the DA had putting this together. Anthony didn’t want to get his hopes up, but he and Michael had always had such fun with cyphers in Arithmancy. And, marked with an asterisk in Anthony’s memory, Michael’s name was on the list.

In Arithmancy classes, they’d worked on all sorts of encryption and symbology spells. As Anthony didn’t have any information about what spell had been used here, and he didn’t want to waste time trying to brute force a solution, he would have to start by testing cyphers on the symbols, based on letter frequency. This sort of thing was fast with a computer, but Anthony didn’t dare risk bringing SOW work into his office. It was far too sensitive—everything about it. So he did it by hand. Exam conditions, just for fun. No distractions. Nothing until he cracked it.

It took four hours. By one in the morning, Anthony had turned the encrypted message into something that made sense.

_Whitehall,_

_News from our orderly friend. Our overseers are making moves to increase their influence in your quarters. Keep your eyes open. Any luck with finding their people among your people, our orderly friend would like to know as soon as possible._

_Stay safe,_

_Groundskeeper_

Well—it made sense in English, if not intuitively. There were more ways to encrypt a message than a cryptographer could crack. Anthony didn’t know what he’d expected.

At least it wasn’t a love note.

 

* * *

 

“Whitehall,” Aubrey said. “We’ve suspected for some time that the DA have a man among the Muggles. They anticipate too many of our moves.”

“Our—us? SOW?”

They were sitting in Aubrey’s office. Aubrey had taken half a second to express his approval of Anthony’s work before getting right down to business.

“No, I am quite certain nobody knows about us outside of a handful of people. I mean the Muggle government. Someone working for Blair.”

“And ‘our orderly friend’ is someone in the Order,” Anthony guessed.

“A double agent,” Aubrey said, nodding. “And I presume he’s talking about the Ministry. So the Order’s Ministry informant is talking to the DA.”

“Have you met the Order’s Ministry informant?”

“We have our own Order informant. Well, not so much an informant as an old friend of mine who’s happy to collaborate. We have an agreement with the Order. To my understanding, the Order do _not_ have any such arrangement with the DA. So this is big, Anthony. Very big.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Anthony regretted the question as soon as it was out of his mouth. He regretted it before he saw the way Aubrey’s mouth flatlined, his whole demeanor closing up.

“Believe me, Anthony, I would tell you if I could,” he said. “But these are early days—both for you and for this discovery we’ve made. We must both tread carefully. I don’t suppose I need to tell you, but you cannot even pass this information on to your colleagues.”

“I won’t,” Anthony said.

He wasn’t close enough with any of them to chat about anything other than work. He supposed it might be different if he worked at Thames House all the time; the very thing that made him valuable to SOW was the same thing that kept him at arm’s length, finishing off his DPhil at Oxford.

He resolved to change that this afternoon. After his meeting with Aubrey, he sought out Robert and Innogen in the office.

“I’m in London overnight. What do you lot do for fun around here?”

They shared a look that Anthony could not read.

“Well,” Robert said ponderously, “most nights I go home to my wife and we have a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and play a game of Scrabble.”

“I teach myself the rudiments of a new language every month,” Innogen said. “Tonight I’m continuing with Mermish.”

“You’re welcome to join us for dinner,” Robert said.

“No, thank you,” Anthony said. “I don’t want to impose.”

They were older than him, but he hadn’t expected them to be such sticks in the mud. Spies were, allegedly, a lot more glamorous. There were old haunts and irresponsible drinking. Anthony had not been irresponsibly drunk in too long.

Instead he stayed the night at his parents’ house and fell asleep in front of the telly.

He was not that kind of spy. None of them were that kind of spy. If they were that kind of spy they wouldn’t be working office jobs. Anthony at least had a point of difference—he was the only one equipped to get directly into the minds of the DA, the magical world’s most dangerous rebel group. Every message he translated would get him closer to his old friends, to the world that kicked him out. He did not have to be that kind of spy to get back in.

 

* * *

 

The messages arrived regularly after that. At least one a night, if not more. Anthony ran his code and worked on his thesis during the day, then he went back to his dorm to translate cyphers from the DA. Now that he knew the code it went a lot faster; they didn’t think to change their code, which was probably well and good for their current purposes, because it would have been near indecipherable to anyone without either the decryption spell or the training to do it by hand. This code had likely kept them nice and safe for years. They did not know that the Muggle intelligence service, of all people, had now worked out a way in.

A few names popped up with regularity. Groundskeeper was one of them; he liaised with their Orderly Friend, who never wrote missives of his own but had a lot to say on the state of the Ministry, not all of it interesting but routinely conveyed nevertheless. They had two informants at the Ministry; the other was fittingly known as Grass. Other frequent communicators were Saint, Skeleton, and someone enigmatically nicknamed Dickhead. There seemed to be two strategists, Knight and Rook. As well as Whitehall, the people who received the most messages were Shorty and Firework. A lot of the messages referred to You Know Who—that one was obvious. They also spoke about Storm. It didn’t take a cryptographer to make the leap from storm to lightning, lightning to Potter,

As for the rest, Anthony made a game of guessing which of them might be his old friends, matching them to the names on the list in his mind. He remembered Potter’s friend Weasley had a liking for chess, because Michael always used to challenge him, and lose. Maybe Weasley was Knight or Rook. Skeleton could easily be Susan Bones. The rest were too obscure. Dickhead could be anyone.

Anthony reported his findings back to Aubrey at the end of every week. They’d set up an unofficial Portkey station from an occult corner of one of Oxford’s oldest libraries. Every Thursday, Innogen came up to Oxford and worked on Apparition with Anthony. It was, she told him, the hardest spell he would have to relearn.

“My wand was snapped, too,” she said. Anthony did not ask how she knew that was how he’d lost his wand. “I was sent to Azkaban. I thought I’d forget every spell I still remembered while I was in there.”

“How did you get out?”

Innogen had drawn two circles in the grass. They were in a public garden, but it was midnight, and her charms were strong enough to keep them hidden. Now she stopped in one of the circles, pensive.

“I cleared my mind. Dementors sense your feelings. Soon after I arrived in Azkaban, I fought someone—I don’t know who he was, he was older than me by a lot. I punched out some of his teeth so they moved me to a solitary cell, which was what I wanted. I meditated every day and worked on my Occlumency until I was good enough to just—to walk right out of there.”

In 1993, the Prophet said that Sirius Black was the only person to ever escape from Azkaban. Anthony remembered Luna Lovegood, in the Ravenclaw common room, telling anyone who would listen that this was wrong. “The first escape was the year after Azkaban started operating as a prison,” she told Anthony, because he always took the bullet and listened to her conjectures, so that he and Michael and Terry could laugh about it afterwards. “Since then, there have been no fewer than a hundred escapees. Of course the Ministry doesn’t want you to know. They want you to think that it’s safe. But the truth is, you can walk right out of there, if you know how.”

Luna’s name was on the list of known members of the DA. If Anthony ever saw her again, he would apologise for every single time he doubted her, even if she’d only been right one time in a hundred.

“You know the real joke of it?” Innogen continued. “I was already living as a Muggle, when they found me. I hated this world. I was miserable at Hogwarts and I was miserable in my job at the Ministry, so I quit, and ended up with MI5. That’s where Bertram found me.”

“So you were in the SOW before the war?”

“Of course not. But I sure as hell went back to work once I got out of Azkaban. How did you get out?”

“I didn’t. I skipped the Portkey and ran out of the Ministry.” Anthony grinned at her. “Punched a couple of people, too.”

Innogen stepped out of the circle, and gestured for Anthony to take her place. “Remember how you felt that day. Remember what it was like to force your body to do things it would never normally do, and remember how detached you felt. Now shut your eyes and clear your mind.”

“I never did like destination, determination, and deliberation,” Anthony said.

“Twee, isn’t it? Clear your mind until all you see is the other circle. No need to give your wand such a death grip; know that it’s in your hand. Same goes for shutting your eyes. Just lightly. You are nowhere at all until you’re in that circle. You’re nowhere. You’re nobody. Don’t leave. Arrive.”

Anthony did as Innogen told him. He put himself back in the Ministry; wandless, hollow, white-hot with anger. Then he placed himself in the circle.

“You see,” Innogen said. “You forget how to do magic, but your body doesn’t.”

Anthony opened his eyes. He was looking at the place where he’d just been standing; Innogen was back in the circle. Now she stepped backwards five paces, and the circle moved with her.

“Aim further each time.”

 

* * *

 

With a pop, Anthony arrived on the streets of London. It was nighttime. Black sky, bright lights. He was near Whitehall, but not for work. He had a meeting with Aubrey the next afternoon and had decided to come down a night early—instead of staying with his parents, he was going to get drunk.

There were a number of bars in the area; Innogen, when pressed, had been able to recommend one, which was the haunt of civil servants and spooks alike. A busy place. Somewhere Anthony could be anonymous.

He had to make his way through a dense crowd to get to the bar. He was wearing one of his only suits, like he’d just come out of a long day’s work. Everyone he squeezed past was wearing an identical suit; trousers for the men and pencil skirts for the women. It was as far as you could get from the untamed colours and loose fabrics of wizard’s robes. Anthony knew which he’d choose, if he had the option.

At the bar, he leant forward, shouting to be heard: “I’ll have a whisky, neat.”

“What type of whisky?” the bartender asked. He was young and trendy. The sound system, blending back into the noise, was playing Franz Ferdinand.

Anthony made a face. “I don’t know. Something cheap?”

The bartender laughed; Anthony didn’t mind being laughed at, not for this. He knew he was a poser. All he had to do was be seen drinking what the young so-and-sos of Whitehall were drinking. Look the part.

The whisky was cheap and didn’t taste anything like firewhisky, nor the whisky cocktails Anthony had tried at college parties. He took a small sip and nearly coughed his lungs out. It was like sniffing paint thinner. Maybe he didn’t want to be trendy any longer. With tears pricking at the corner of his eyes, he turned around to ask the bartender for some water.

Halfway, someone caught him by the arm. “Anthony?”

The man looking at him was in a suit like every other civil servant at the bar. He had an aristocratic face, framed by short-cut brown curls, and a plummy accent to match, though Anthony would have to hear him say more than his name to be certain. He searched his memory for this face, this voice. His memory took him to King’s Cross station, 1997. The Hogwarts Express taking them home for the last time. A hug that lasted slightly too long, and a hopeful whisper: “See you in September.”

Anthony said, “Justin?”

He went from King’s Cross to his dorm at Wadham, reading and memorising a list. Justin Finch-Fletchley. He was not listed as a member; just an associate. How had they missed this? Justin was Whitehall. Justin was Whitehall and Anthony was an idiot.

“I don’t believe it,” Justin said, and pulled Anthony into a hug.

For a moment Anthony didn’t know what to do with his hands. He managed to get his whisky back down on the counter and then, cautiously, he put his arms around Justin’s back. He’d spent so much time lately clearing his mind for Apparition—“Useful for Occlumency, too,” Innogen’s voice said at the back of his mind—that he was struggling to find the right emotions for this occasion. It had been eight years. They were different people. They were on the same side; Justin just didn’t know it yet.

Justin pulled back, resting his hands on Anthony’s shoulders. “You’re alive,” he said. “And not in—well, you know. You’re alive. Let me buy you a drink.”

“Oh, thank god,” Anthony said. “Turns out I can’t stand whisky.”

Justin laughed, and Anthony found it hard not to laugh with him. Justin ordered a gin and tonic for Anthony and a vodka cranberry for himself; they sought out a corner in the bar, since there were no tables free. If there was anywhere they could talk about magic and not risk being overheard, this was it. Anthony put up a silencing charm anyway, wandless.

“Impressive,” Justin said. “I guess I know what you’ve been doing these past eight years.”

“I’ve had to make do.” Actually, it was a trick Aubrey had taught him just last week, but it didn’t hurt for Justin to be a little removed from the truth. “And what have you been doing?”

“Oh, being boring, you know. The civil service. Very Muggle. And what are you doing around these parts?”

Anthony had a cover story, of course, like every other MI5 operative. “I’m part-time in the Treasury, on an internship. I’ve been pursuing a doctorate in mathematics at Oxford. I should graduate in a few months, and then I’ll be here full-time.”

“Goodness,” Justin said, “I’ll be calling you Dr. Goldstein. We really are old.”

“Twenty-five isn’t old,” Anthony said, self-conscious. He’d been twenty-five for less than half a year. Some days he felt fifty.

“We have to stay in touch. Us outcasts. I’m not losing track of you now.”

“You haven’t—” Anthony had to be careful. He couldn’t let on that he knew anything about the DA. “You’re not in touch with anyone else?”

“Of course not,” Justin said, though not angrily. “I went into hiding as soon as I heard the Ministry had fallen. I was underground for… god, for two years, before I realised I’d never be able to go back. I started doing Muggle work, got a job in the civil service on my father’s recommendation. It’s been easy to forget, being among the privileged classes out here, that I’m…”

Neither of them wanted to say it. They were Muggleborn. Set foot back in the magical world and they’d be dead on arrival. Well, Justin would be dead on arrival because he was part of a group branded as terrorists by the Ministry. Anthony might have a fighting chance—he’d already escaped their clutches once.

“Do you miss it?” Anthony asked. It was the kind of convincing question that said, I think you’re in the same boat as me.

“Every day.” Justin bowed his head; was he hiding a smile?

“Then let’s meet up again.”

DA or no DA, Anthony would do what he could to get closer to the magical world. To the rest of his friends, who were still out there. He wasn’t sure what he’d say to Aubrey—he supposed he was honour-bound to report this meeting, as this was Whitehall, the DA’s man in the government. But. This was _Justin_. All Anthony wanted to do right now was stay out and drink with him. They had eight years to catch up on, even if neither of them could tell the whole truth.

“Yes, we must,” Justin said. “I can’t get out of the office much, so would you come meet me for lunch next week?”

“Of course. Where?”

Justin shrugged. “I can’t stray too far; I need to be on call most hours of the day. Can you swing by Number Ten?”

 

* * *

 

They sat in the same coffee shop where Aubrey had handed Anthony the list of known members and associates of Dumbledore’s Army. Aubrey was visiting to check on Anthony’s progress with the latest round of DA missives, and Anthony was taking an extended lunch break.

“You’ve done good work on these,” Aubrey said. He put the pages of collated decryptions back together and  squared them against the table. “Is there anything else?”

“What exactly,” Anthony said, “did Dumbledore’s Army do to be called _terrorists_?”

It wasn’t what he’d meant to say, but the question was out of his mouth before he could stop himself. He’d been thinking about it ever since he met with Justin. He’d been thinking about what Aubrey had said, that SOW worked with the Order to keep the peace. That there was fire and there was friendly fire.

“To be honest, I’m surprised it’s taken you until now to ask.”

“They’re my friends. If it’s something bad, it’ll be hard for me to hear.”

“Well,” Aubrey said, “they kill people.”

Anthony didn’t react. In a way, this was exactly what he’d expected to hear. “Go on.”

“To date, we’ve traced the assassination of seven influential figures in the Death Eater hierarchy to the DA. That may not seem like a lot, but to contextualise, the only Death Eater stronghold the Order have even managed to infiltrate is the Ministry. We know, thanks to you, that the DA have at least two people in the Ministry, one of whom is also in the Order, and that they’re keeping watch on comings and goings. We also know that at least fifteen attacks in the last two years, which correspond to Death Eater strongholds, were not committed by the Order nor claimed by any other party. Who else could it be?”

“Attacks?”

“Bombings,” Aubrey said. “The Order have never resorted to such tactics. The Order use traditional tools—espionage, propaganda, pirate radio. Their radio station is very sweet, actually. I’ll make sure you’re in London for our next Potterwatch listening party.”

“So we like the Order because they play by the rulebook,” Anthony said. He hoped his skepticism didn’t show in his voice. There was more than one way to fight a war. “We don’t trust the DA because they’re secretive, and they kill people.”

“The fastest route to revolution, Anthony, is not through stooping as low as your enemies. It is through the minds of your allies.”

“Then there’s one other thing,” Anthony said. “I know who Whitehall is.”

Aubrey leant forward.

Anthony continued, “I ran into an old friend at a bar the other night and I knew it had to be him. I’m only sorry I didn’t tell you sooner; I guess you can imagine my dilemma. I had Robert double-check the civil service employment records, and now I’m certain. His name is Justin Finch-Fletchley. He’s a special aide to the Prime Minister.”

“One of those jobs that doesn’t mean much, but has an awfully high clearance level.”

“Exactly. Justin’s father is in the House of Lords and got him the position, given he has no university education to fall back on. I obviously don’t know how he got involved with the DA—if they found him once he was in the job, or he was already part of the group, even when…”

“You sound bitter.”

“Do I?”

“Anthony,” Aubrey said, “lie to me, by all means, but don’t lie to yourself.”

He was right, of course. Justin had found the DA, or the DA had found Justin—either way, he was part of it. When it looked like the only two options were Azkaban or exile, Justin had found a third. Anthony was furiously bitter. He would give up his DPhil to be Justin Finch-Fletchley.

“So what do we do now?” he asked.

“You have done excellent work as a cryptographer,” Aubrey said. “The time has come for you to step away from your desk.”

 

* * *

 

Number 10 Downing Street was kept apart from the rabble by heavy security. The general election was less than a month away. Anthony, a postgrad at Oxford ostensibly interning with the Treasury, did not even have the clearance to get within sight of the front door. As it was, he flashed his MI5 staff card at a security guard, who let him pass the blockade. He didn’t dare get too close—verisimilitude was as important as the acquisition of information. He stood across the road and waited.

A few minutes passed before Justin came dashing out the front door. He looked a world more put together than he had the other night. There was a lanyard flying around his neck; a handful of journalists tried to stop him for questions, but he waved them off.

“Anthony, thank god you could make it,” he said. “This place is a circus. I managed to get the afternoon off—don’t ask how. Tony’s not happy about it.”

“You’re on first name terms with the Prime Minister? Justin—”

“Oh, don’t tease. Father’s still unhappy about it; natch he’s hoping for a Tory win in May. Anthony, you would not _believe_ the strings that have been pulled to get me here! It’s a miracle Tony looks my way at all.”

“I feel like I’ve stepped through the door to Narnia,” Anthony said. “Or, you know.”

Justin gave him a sly smile. “Do you still have your w-a-n-d?” He spelt it out letter by letter. “You might need it where we’re going.”

They were already walking away from Downing Street, and they slipped into an alley Anthony could’ve sworn wasn’t there on his way in. “I have a different wand to before. Long story.”

“A gentleman never pries,” Justin said. “I am certain you obtained your wand by faultlessly legal means, and I will ask no further. But show it to me!”

Anthony looked up and down the street, making sure nobody was around. He kept his new wand in a holster around his forearm, hidden neatly by his loose jacket, and now he reached a finger up his sleeve and slipped the wand out.

“Oh,” Justin said, sounding genuinely awed, “isn’t it beautiful?”

“I like it more than my old one,” Anthony confessed. “So where _are_ we going?”

“Take my hand. I’ll take you side-along.”

“I can Apparate myself.”

Justin hummed. “But I’d really rather you didn’t.”

He grabbed Anthony’s hand without warning, and space squeezed around them. Anthony shut his eyes and desperately tried to clear his mind; side-along was more bearable when you stepped outside yourself. He had just gone clear when he felt solid ground beneath his feet again. They were standing on a hill. There were clouds in the sky when there had been none in London, and a town in the distance.

“You know,” Anthony said, “I _have_ been to Hogsmeade before.”

“We have spells to detect any magic performed in the area, and the signal of the wand that performed the spell,” Justin said. “I’ll get you clearance in a minute, but you understand that I couldn’t have your arrival set off any of our alarms.”

Though Anthony already knew the answer, he asked, “Who are _we_?”

Justin smiled wide; he had been holding this in for some time. “We’re Dumbledore’s Army.”

 

* * *

 

Before the war started, there were warning signs. There were attacks all around magical Britain. There were attacks at Hogwarts. Letters had been sent home to parents assuring them that the attacks were being investigated, and that it would not happen again. The letters always ended with, _There is nowhere safer than Hogwarts_.

“There’s nowhere safer than Hogwarts,” Justin explained as they walked. Their entrance to the sprawling grounds was through an underground passage that ran from the Hog’s Head to the Forbidden Forest. “Unplottable, invisible to Muggles. Full of ingredients and books and students to radicalise.”

Anthony waited for Justin to crack a smile, or any indication that he was joking. It did not come.

“We’ve built a home in the Forbidden Forest,” he continued. “We have a small intake of students every year: Muggleborns. We even sneak up to the castle to borrow the Sorting Hat for them. The Ministry really shot themselves in the foot, restricting the trace by lineage. We have some bright minds in our R&D division. It was Padma who worked out how to get the trace running on our end.”

“Padma,” Anthony said, breathless and not from the walking. “I haven’t seen Padma since our last patrol together on the Hogwarts Express.”

Justin sighed. “It’s thanks to Padma we have a school at all. A lot of us are teachers now, or researchers. Michael does a lot of Arithmancy, like you I suppose. And then a lot of us are on the front lines. We have people in the Ministry. People in the Muggle government—well, just me, but you know. We’re everywhere. We even have someone in the—I’ll have to fill you in on the Order of the Phoenix.”

Anthony nodded along like he didn’t already know this. There was some new information in there. Teachers, researchers. Aubrey had mentioned the problem of the overlooked Muggleborn children; now Anthony knew exactly where they were going. And there were names. Padma, Michael. Would Anthony see them when they arrived? And who else?

The tunnel tapered to its end. There was no light from the chute up to the surface; they were in the Forbidden Forest, beneath a thick canopy. The tunnel came out in an area that looked like it could have been any forest anywhere in Scotland. It was the same in every direction.

“This way,” Justin said.

They walked for ten minutes more. Anthony had never conceived of how large the Forbidden Forest was. This grandeur made sense. The DA were certainly well-hidden.

At last they came to a clearing in the forest. There was a garden of fruit, vegetables, and potion ingredients, and there were teenagers kneeling about the place with trowels. Eight years, Anthony thought. Eight generations of witches and wizards who’d never made it to Hogwarts; the closest they got was a forest that was off-limits to regular students. How many of them were still here? He’d wager all of them. Children drafted into a war in a world they hadn’t known existed. The sight of them laughing and gardening made his heart ache.

Behind the garden was a house. No, to call it a _house_ was an understatement. It was a wooden structure built around the trees with not a care in the world for architectural convention. Rooms were stacked precariously atop one another, some windows open and others very deliberately shut. The front door looked to be made of one giant panel of wood, and it had a Hogwarts crest crudely carved at the centre. In place of the Latin motto were the words: _Dumbledore’s Army, still recruiting_.

“I’d give you a grand welcome,” Justin said, “but after seven years, this place still doesn’t have a name. Heaven knows we’ve floated a lot of options. The Forbidden Castle. Mirror Hogwarts. DAHQ. Most of us just call it home.”

Anthony had been there mere minutes. It already felt like some kind of home. Moreso when the door to the ramshackle castle creaked open and two people stepped out, and Anthony stopped in his tracks.

“I told you I’d found him,” Justin said.

“I’m sorry we didn’t believe you,” Terry said; Michael was already running to Anthony full tilt.

Anthony threw open his arms and caught him. Somewhere in the middle of it he’d started crying ugly tears. He didn’t care about SOW. He didn’t care about the DA. He cared about his two best friends, the people who’d been by his side as he grew up, who he hadn’t seen for longer than he’d known them in the first place. Anthony’s eyes were screwed shut when a second pair of arms wrapped around them both.

“You’re alive,” Michael said. “You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive—”

“Oh, holy shit,” Terry said, “I haven’t cried this much in years.”

Neither had Anthony. He’d practised putting up walls and this was what sent them crashing down. If anyone were to look into his mind right now, they’d find it wide open. “I missed both of you so fucking much,” he said.

Terry let go, and then Michael. Anthony finally got a proper look at them. Terry was exactly the same, if a little taller. Michael’s looks had settled in a different way Anthony had always expected them too; and he was missing an eye, heavy scarring in its place.

He must’ve seen Anthony staring. “Yeah,” Michael said, “we’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

“Stay for dinner,” Terry said. “Hannah’s making shepherd’s pie.”

Hannah. Padma. Michael, Terry, Justin. Who else was in here, right now?

Anthony’s thoughts were interrupted by a shout from the back of the garden. “Was someone meant to meet me at the Hog’s Head? I swear to Merlin I requested backup.”

This was another familiar voice—Zacharias. He was even taller, which was saying something. Or he would’ve been, if he weren’t doubled over and limping towards them, one hand on a gushing wound in his thigh. It brought Anthony back to the business at hand. There was a war on the other side of this idyllic house and garden.

“We sent Alicia,” Terry said to Zacharias. “She wasn’t there?”

“No she bloody well wasn’t,” Zacharias grumbled. He stopped by them and clapped Anthony on the shoulder with his free hand; not a friendly gesture, but a bit of much-needed balance. “Hi, Anthony. Long time no see, how’ve you been, don’t we have a lot to catch up on? Et cetera. Can somebody get me a fucking healer before I bleed out on the ghost of Christmas past over here?”

“Sorry, Ant, I’ll be back,” Terry said. “I need to check on Alicia.”

“And get me a healer!”

Justin followed Terry into the house, and Michael gave Zacharias a look that could’ve wilted half the plants in the garden. “You took your time, Dickhead,” he said.

Anthony’s eyes went wide. Dickhead, in the letters—one of the names who sent the most coded messages, always reporting from the front lines. He would never have expected that from contrarian Zacharias. On the other hand, he supposed that if any of them were to be known as Dickhead, Zacharias was always going to be a likely candidate.

Zacharias did not miss Anthony’s expression. He smirked. “My codename. Don’t worry, I picked it.”

“Oh,” Anthony said, trying to sound pleasantly bewildered.

“Let’s get him inside,” Michael said. “I’ll take the other arm. I don’t mind a bit of blood.”

“Are you going to tell Anthony the story behind that?” Zacharias said, teasing.

Michael looked stonily ahead as their contender in a five-legged race hobbled up to the house. “There’s a story behind most things here,” Michael said. “War’s like that.”

 

* * *

 

Oxford felt wrong after the Forbidden Forest.

Anthony had been so determined to make this place his home. He wondered now if he’d chosen it because it felt like Hogwarts; old stone, drafty corridors, endless libraries. There was a certain mysticism to Oxford that it shared with places like Hogwarts, and which the rest of the world was missing. But even that couldn’t make up for the hole left in Anthony’s heart when he Apparated from Hogsmeade back to his campus. He keeled over, dizzy. This was what happened when you didn’t sufficiently clear your mind for the arrival.

In the morning, he would go to London with a clear head and tell Aubrey everything. Tonight, he needed to be alone. He needed, but he wanted to be back with the DA. He wanted those few hours where he’d been able to sit around and eat on the floor with his old friends, catching up on their lives—omitting, on both parts, he was sure, certain details. Michael confirmed offhandedly he was the one who encrypted their communications, though there was no time to talk procedure. He’d been one of their active operatives, like Zacharias, until he lost his eye. Terry, on the other hand, barely left the forest: he taught at their school, alongside Ernie, Susan, Padma. Hannah basically ran the place. Neville and Ginny officially ran the place, as its leaders.

They’d all matured in ways Anthony hadn’t expected. Luna had traded in her whimsy for a steely sort of determination. Ginny and Zacharias could exist in the same room without trying to slit each other’s throats. Ron Weasley had a two year old daughter; she was Hermione’s, of course, and Hermione was away on important DA business. Nobody said the name _Harry Potter_ , but Anthony heard it anyway.

As for Anthony, he ended up telling his story so many times he almost believed it was real. He was doing an internship with the Treasury. This was the first magic he’d seen in eight years. He couldn’t tell them where he’d found his new wand.

Anthony got lost staring at himself in his bathroom mirror. He didn’t look like a wizard anymore. He pulled a loose twig out of his hair; he looked like a scrawny mathematician who’d gotten lost in the woods. His eyes, hidden behind thick glasses, hadn’t seen the same things as the eyes he’d looked into all afternoon and evening. He’d been deprived of their experiences. He’d been spared.

The amount of information he’d been able to gather was minimal. In the scheme of things, it didn’t matter. There would be other opportunities. Anthony’s wand was added to the DA’s register; he could go there whenever he liked. There was a lot that Aubrey would want to know. More importantly, though, Anthony could not go back to living in a world without his friends.

Later, he would think about what it meant that he was spying on them.

 

* * *

 

“Sit,” Aubrey said. “Tell us everything.”

Robert and Innogen were in his office too. Alongside Anthony, they had been seconded onto a new subdivision within SOW: a sort of case management team for the DA. Anthony didn’t know if this was because they were on the young side, or because they were the closest to him.

“Where do you want me to start?” Anthony said. There were so many angles to this. There was the core of it: the school, the Muggleborns, the spying. There was where they were located, how to find them. There was the story, from the beginning.

“Names, I think. So we’re certain we have the right of it. Then their movements.”

So Anthony told them. He had an updated list of names—Fred Weasley, deceased, could be struck from the record—and a few of their roles and codenames to go alongside. He had less detail on their movements, but his audience were rapt nevertheless. Then at last he told them about the school, and the missing children.

He did not tell them what it had felt like to step into the Forbidden Forest for the first time. Anthony had been a Prefect at Hogwarts and always an exemplary student; stories of sneaking out were fragments of other people’s lives. He’d once stood on the edge of the forest, in fourth year. Everyone was busy caring about the Triwizard Tournament. Anthony stood there and thought about going in and Michael had said, “What, you’re chicken?” Yeah. Anthony was chicken. He hadn’t gone in.

He didn’t tell Aubrey and Innogen and Robert what it felt like to step back into his life and find it ill-fitting. To see people he hadn’t seen in eight years and to see that they were different people entirely. To see his name on a piece of parchment, framed and hanging on the wall: the original roster of Dumbledore’s Army.

Robert scrawled notes while Anthony spoke; perhaps he was only there as a scribe. Aubrey and Innogen listened, nodding when it made sense to. Aubrey waited patiently until Anthony signalled that he was entirely finished before speaking.

“This is a good start. Now there are three things we need from you. Their orderly friend. Their next attack. The whereabouts of Harry Potter.”

“I’ll do my best,” Anthony said.

Robert gave him a twisted smile that said, wrong answer.

Anthony amended, “I’ll do it.”

“It’s a big switch,” Innogen said, “from office work to the field. But we’re confident that you have the talent to pull this off. Your magic has already improved exponentially.”

“It’s the wand,” Anthony said.

“And not just talent.” Aubrey slid a hand against the table and slid Robert’s notes towards him. “You have the history with these people to make it work. I do hope you don’t harbour any residual affection for them?”

Bile rose in Anthony’s throat. “I barely know them.”

“Good,” Aubrey said. “Very good.”

 

* * *

 

The truth was that Anthony barely knew them. People could change a lot in eight years. Anthony had been in his own company for the past eight years and had no idea if—and in that case, how—he’d changed. It was always so much easier to see these things from the outside.

So: the people he barely knew. Anthony had this romantic idea in his head that having Michael and Terry back in his life meant that his life would revert to how it had been. Three was the perfect number for a group of friends. Each edge of an equilateral triangle had its own very fine qualities, and its faults. The point perpendicular to the centre of the edge balanced those faults. Their divisions made them congruent.

Now Michael sat at a writing desk in his small study, one of the outcrop rooms of the DA’s castle. He was hunched over a scroll of parchment, squinting at it with his one eye. “Absolutely not,” Michael said. “I’m not going to tell you how it works. Nobody knows but me. You have the spell to encrypt and decrypt. Most people find that closing one eye while you cast helps.”

“Oh, come on,” Anthony said, “who am I going to tell? You-Know-Who?”

“I get that you study maths—”

“Cryptography. I study cryptography. I am literally an expert in the field.”

Michael turned over his shoulder to give Anthony an absolutely foul look. “You think you’re too good for us, huh, with your fancy degree? Dr. Goldstein. I wouldn’t tell you if you were Merlin himself.”

“You’re not supposed to call me _doctor_ until I graduate.”

Anthony let the rest of it hang between them for a moment. Maybe he had made a mistake in asking—but it was between showing too much interest, which was definitely suspicious, or no interest at all, which was even more suspicious for somebody with a background in the field. Anthony had gambled on Michael remembering what he was like. That had been a mistake.

“I have an academic interest in your work,” he said at last, to clear the air. “But if you’re that concerned about secrecy, I’ll leave you to it.”

Anthony didn’t need to know how the spell worked, anyway. He could decrypt the DA’s messages without it, because he was an expert in the field. He really did _want_ this—he wanted to immerse himself in the maths and pretend that this was old and familiar. He wanted to be a student of magic again.

“Yeah,” Michael said, burying himself in his work again, “fuck off.”

There weren’t many places Anthony could fuck off to in the middle of the day. The majority of rooms in the castle were bedrooms or classrooms. There was one big common room, and a “Great Hall” for dining. Most of the time, these were full of students on a break from their lessons, who gave Anthony wary looks whenever he passed. He didn’t blame them. He’d be giving himself a wary look too if he had a mirror. Maybe he had been too transparent—but if Michael still knew him, Michael would know that he was being genuine about not having anyone to tell. SOW didn’t care how he did what he did, so long as he was getting results.

Anthony couldn’t go back to SOW yet, either, nor back home to Oxford. That was about _want_ as well. He had to find somewhere else to be.

There were maybe a hundred people living in this castle, maybe more. A growing army. The bedrooms were organised loosely by house and joined by walkways between the trees, with the exception of the core DA, who stayed together. Because they were the ones who went out most, their wing of the castle was closest to the makeshift hospital. This was where Anthony went now.

Zacharias was the only person in the hospital wing. Probably for the best—his and everyone else’s. He had his injured right leg propped up on a cushion and he was reading a tatty Muggle paperback.

“Our esteemed guest deigns to visit,” he said, not looking up. “What have I done to deserve your condescension?”

“Could you talk like a normal person for one minute?” Anthony said. He sighed; Zacharias was looking at him now, waiting on an answer. “I don’t have anywhere to be, especially while classes are in session. Michael kicked me out, and I’m a masochist, so I figured I’d come find the only person who’s less personable than he is.”

“You know, I’m actually quite well-liked around here,” Zacharias said, waving one lazy hand at the chair by his bedside.

Anthony took the chair. “Sure.”

“No, really. Once I got over my antipathy to how gauche it felt to hitch myself to a cause, I started to enjoy this. Not to be flippant about life-or-death politics, but it is a bit of a lark. Do you remember when we first started doing this, in fifth year? You told me to my face that you were only working with me out of pity.”

“I said I didn’t know why you were there. I didn’t think you knew either.”

“Do you think I know now?”

“You’ve just told me you became a revolutionary for the hell of it,” Anthony said. “I think you care—otherwise you’d be fighting a different battle.”

Zacharias was determined to press him. “Did you miss having something to fight?”

“I’m not sure that I’m fighting anything just yet.”

“I knew why I was there,” Zacharias said, “in fifth year. And I know why I’m here now. I think you’re the one who doesn’t know why he’s here. Maybe I’m only talking to you out of pity.”

Anthony sat back, sighing. “Yeah. I think they’re only letting me visit out of pity. I mean, it’s not like I’m any use. Michael’s doing the only job I’m qualified for. I’m no good at the kind of work you do. I barely did any magic since the Ministry snapped my wand; I’m only just getting back into it and do you know what? I feel like a fraud. I haven’t got any claim to this world. I mean—not because of blood politics, or whatever. I mean I’ve missed the fucking war and you were all doing just fine without me.”

Zacharias scrutinised him for a long time, saying nothing. Anthony had said too much. He didn’t care; all of it was true and he was wrung out with the pressure of keeping it in.

At last Zacharias said, “I think you’d be better at my kind of work than you know.”

They might have exchanged more words than that, but they would’ve been words that could only be exchanged in private, and suddenly the hospital wasn’t a private place—the door clattered open and someone stumbled in, followed by Parvati and Neville. The man with them was familiar, though Anthony couldn’t place from where. He had the looks of someone who’d put considerable distance between himself and his awkward youth and come out the better for it; someone older than the majority of the DA. Anthony’s thoughts went to their spy in the Order.

Parvati helped the man into one of the beds. He had no visible wounds but he was clutching his side.

“Did you see who cast the spell?” Neville asked him.

“Couldn’t tell,” the man said. “It couldn’t have been anyone too high up in the pecking order, though. This smarts but I’ll be back on my feet in a few hours.”

Neville stopped, pensive, and looked around the room. Only then did he realise that Anthony and Zacharias were watching all of this happen. “Oh,” he said. “How’re you recovering, Zach?”

“Better than the Groundskeeper over there,” Zacharias said, jerking a thumb at Oliver, who gave him a middle finger in return.

They kept chatting, the kind of back-and-forth that made Anthony think Zacharias might really be well-liked these days. Though he wasn’t paying attention what they said—his brain was working a mile a minute. This Oliver fellow—had he been a Quidditch player, was that why Anthony recognised him?—wrote an awful lot of letters, most of them about his liaisons with their Orderly Friend. Anthony was one degree of separation from completing the first of the information-gathering tasks Aubrey had set him.

Anthony tuned back in to see Parvati coming over to them. “Might as well check on this one’s leg while he’s making all that hot air,” she said, giving Anthony a smile.

“Is this your domain?” he asked her.

“I have a little help,” Parvati said. “When we first set up here, Lavender and I would sneak up to Hogwarts to get advice from Madam Pomfrey. Turns out we both have quite an aptitude for potions with someone other than that horrible old bat teaching us.”

The old bat was Snape, now the headmaster of Hogwarts. “Do you ever run into him?”

“Nobody’s been so unlucky. There’ve only been a few scuffles at Hogwarts.”

And the unlucky would end up here—this hospital wing had large windows and no lack of light, potions in glass bottles lining the sills and scattering every colour over the walls and beds. This was the kind of place where you would not hate yourself for taking too long to recover.

“Well, I’m impressed,” Anthony said, gesturing around the place. “You’ve set up something incredible here.”

“We do what we have to,” Parvati said. The subtext: if I could choose, I would not be running a hospital. I would be pursuing something purely for the joy of it. None of us have been so lucky. She said, “How about you, I heard you’re getting a doctorate! Now, that’s impressive.”

It was, in peacetime. And that was the problem.

 

* * *

 

Aubrey had described the Order of the Phoenix to Anthony as a stuffy old guard. Aubrey himself was in his forties; Anthony presumed that the Order, veterans of the first war, were a cantankerous group of grizzled seventy year olds who spoke a lot about the good old days as though fascism was something you could cure with a good wand arm and a bit of gumption. Then again, Aubrey said that his chief contact in the Order was an old school friend; Anthony supposed the first war had been a children’s war, too.

There were two men from the Order, waiting at a booth table in a cheap restaurant just near Whitehall. One of them was the erstwhile Professor Lupin. The other was a tall redhead, not much older than Anthony. Even at a distance he couldn’t be anyone other than one of Ron’s older brothers.

“I told Remus to bring a protégé,” Aubrey said, “since I knew I would be bringing you.”

Anthony neither looked nor felt like someone’s protégé. He imagined himself in his forties, smartly dressed, greying. He imagined himself with scars from a lifetime in the field. A real agent. Somehow, he didn’t think so.

Then, perhaps fittingly, his introduction understated the truth: “This is Anthony. He’s our man in the DA.”

“The DA,” Lupin said, impressed. “You got a foot in the door, at last.”

Percy Weasley gave them an incredulous look. “Not to be pedantic, but _in_ Dumbledore’s Army? We’ve been trying for years, and there’s no hint that Dumbledore’s Army are localised anywhere at all. If you’ve managed to get a new recruit into their organisational hierarchy then—well, that’s—that would be unheard of, in our line of work.”

The thing about pedantry is that, if people expect it from you, they don’t recognise it as prying. Percy was young enough to fit in with the DA, and he had family among them. Anthony had no siblings of his own, but for a time he had Michael and Terry, and that was about the same; it wasn’t easy to keep a secret between brothers.

“Unheard of under normal circumstances, certainly,” Aubrey said. “Anthony was a member of the DA when he was at Hogwarts. A classmate of Harry Potter.” (Anthony didn’t miss the strained twinge across Lupin’s face, at the sound of Potter’s name.) “It was easy enough, then, for us to pull the strings to get him back in place.”

Aubrey neglected to mention that it was entirely a coincidence that Anthony found the DA—or that the DA found him. Of course. This was the British government. They had to confer upon the rest of the world that any consequence adjacent to their actions in fact was directly their doing; except when it was inconvenient.

“Well, I suppose congratulations are in order,” Percy said.

Lupin said, “Where are they based? You have to understand how exciting this is for us, Anthony—the only times we get to hear from the DA are when they blow something up.” He looked at Percy sadly. “It’s no way to keep up with your family.”

Percy went bright red and pursed his lips.

“I can’t tell you where their headquarters are,” Anthony said. It was interesting how Aubrey hadn’t asked him this question at all. Perhaps he understood that Anthony would be reluctant to bring it up. There was no need to organise a raid just yet—besides, the castle was too precious a thing to be disturbed. And he wasn’t lying: “It’s unplottable.”

“Unplottable, but big enough to house half a school’s worth of Muggleborns lost by the new trace,” Aubrey said. “And then some.”

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Lupin said.

Anthony allowed himself a moment of luxuriating in the childish subversiveness of hearing a teacher swear. Then he got right to the point: “The DA are more than just a rebel group. They’re protecting the future of the magical world. It’s imperative that, whatever we do, we work with them, not against.”

“But we neither of us condone their methods of resistance.” Aubrey sat forward and inclined his eyes down at the delegates from the Order. “Do we?”

“No,” Lupin said, and Percy mumbled his assent.

Got you, Anthony thought.

“Stay for dinner and we’ll talk detail,” Aubrey said. “This place is a little rustic, but the fare is good for the price.”

“Unfortunately I can’t stay,” Percy said.

“Neither can I.” Anthony was meeting Justin. Blair had won the general election by a drastically reduced majority, Number Ten was in a tailspin, and Justin sent Anthony a desperate message via owl: _I need to blow off steam!!!!!!_ Anthony said to Percy, “Do you know the area?”

“Not particularly well, to be honest,” Percy said. To be honest, if he was in the Ministry, that would be a lie.

“I’ll walk you to a quiet spot for Apparition.”

“Much obliged.”

They left Aubrey and Lupin to it. There was some unease there; they didn’t act like the old school friends Aubrey insisted they were. The walk with Percy was quiet, too, though Anthony was determined to confirm his hunch before they parted.

“Where are you off to tonight?” he asked.

Percy startled; he hadn’t expected the question. “Oh, well, I don’t have many nights off from work. I’m going out for dinner with my—a person. Somebody.”

“Your person?” Anthony gave Percy the kind of sly look he would usually reserve for someone he knew better. He supposed that was what spying was like. “It’s okay. I’m going on a date tonight. We’re allowed to be happy despite the  war.”

“It’s not really a date if you’ve been engaged since last century,” Percy said, frowning. “My partner—it’s a long story. If you’ve been working with the Muggles, in chief, I don’t suppose you know the half of it. My partner plays Quidditch, but like lots of others, he was blacklisted from the sport for speaking up against the government. Most of the teams in the league were deregistered four years ago, so Oliver doesn’t get out much. We find time where we can.”

Oliver was someone who Anthony had met, someone real. He was another piece of evidence. Anthony was a friendly face with no connection to the magical world; the kind of guy people wouldn’t mind telling _too much_. After all, how was Percy to know that Oliver and Anthony had briefly been in the same room?

“I’m sorry,” Anthony said. “That’s horrid.”

It was horrid, what Anthony had to do with this information. It was simply cruel.

Thank god for Justin. Anthony had someone to distract him for the next few hours, and then he would head back to the DA headquarters, even though he had neither been instructed nor informed Aubrey that he would. This way he didn’t have to think about the horrid thing that he had to think about doing. One day he’d tell Aubrey. Not today, though. Not today.

Percy shrugged.

“Enjoy your dinner,” Anthony said. While you can.

 

* * *

 

If Anthony didn’t think too hard about it, his unsanctioned visits to the Forbidden Forest were the highlight of his life. His days at Oxford were spent preparing for his viva; he had elected to defend instead of write a thesis, as his publication record was strong and he didn’t want to spend any longer than he had to away from work. And work—work was still part-time, and because it was only part time, they had no way of knowing just how much time Anthony was spending amongst the DA.

He found himself in the company of more than a hundred young rebels one clear summer night, under the shade of the trees behind the castle. It was an astronomy lesson; every student, no matter their level, was invited. Susan took the class—as well as teaching, she wrote the propaganda materials that circulated Hogwarts. _Still recruiting_. She was the reason there were halfbloods among them, younger generations who’d graduated from Snape’s totalitarian Hogwarts in the intervening years. There were even a few purebloods; there was Astoria Greengrass, who had been in the grade below Anthony and was now the head of the DA’s Slytherin house. Not all of the people standing around lived in the castle or attended the school, but all of them were wedded to this cause. Not all of them cared for astronomy. They listened anyway.

Anthony stood with Padma, towards the back of the assembled crowd. She was holding Ron and Hermione’s daughter in her lap—Ron and Hermione were busy with things that nobody talked about. The DA’s senior members rotated babysitting duty; tonight it was Padma’s turn, tomorrow it would be Ernie’s.

“It’s not awkward?” Anthony said. “You know, since you and Ron had that horrible date at the Yule Ball…”

“The _Yule Ball_? Grow up, Anthony. That was ten years ago.” Padma nudged Anthony, and the baby gurgled. “You want to talk about awkward, what about you and Michael? Back on speaking terms yet?”

Anthony shifted on his cushion. “Not as such.”

“What exactly did you say to him?”

“It’s a long story,” Anthony said. “I think I’ve been away too long. It’s like I’m learning to be an entirely different person.”

From the centre of the circle gathered around her, Susan addressed her audience: “Can anyone tell me about the significance of a constellation’s distance to the Galactic plane?”

A student shouted out the answer. Anthony had taken an astronomy unit as an undergrad at Oxford; there was no significance in constellations beyond the cultural. This kind of magic was on a level with divination. There wasn’t even a chapter on it in Anthony’s new textbook.

The student who’d answered was sitting near them. The baby, Rose, started crying.

“Oh, too noisy for you?” Padma’s attention was off Anthony in an instant; she twirled one of her fingers through Rose’s curly hair. Back to Anthony: “I think I’d better take her inside.”

“Of course. I’ll keep your place.”

But no sooner had Padma gone than Zacharias swept in from nowhere took her seat. In a low voice he said, “Where’s the best place to tell someone a secret?”

“In private,” Anthony said. That was certainly one way to open a conversation.

“Wrong. You tell a secret in a crowd. Basic espionage. If someone’s listening to you in a quiet room, they’ll hear everything you say. If they’re listening in a crowd, they might hear ten voices at once.”

“What’s that star called?” Susan said. She pointed to a flickering dot on the starmap her wand had conjured, silver-bright like a Patronus. Fifty voices shouted the name in almost-unison, stuttering around the word _Vega_ in one disjointed roar.

Making light of it, Anthony said, “I hope you’re not bugged.”

“We have a policy of no Extendable Ears within a hundred yards of the castle and grounds.” Zacharias put a collegial arm around Anthony’s shoulder; he twisted his wrist and tapped Anthony’s ear with one long finger. “Anyone listening in here?”

“Why would—” No, not _Why would they?_ That implied there was a _they_. “Who would want to listen in on an astronomy lesson?”

“I don’t know who,” Zacharias said. “But I have a pretty good guess that they’re Muggles. I know you’re here to spy on us. Old friends don’t just fall back into new lives like—” he clicked his fingers, “— _that_.”

Anthony shook his head and laughed it off, and hopefully Zacharias couldn’t feel his thundering heartbeat. “I get it, you’ve been doing this work for a while, it’s easy to get caught up in speculation…”

“Oh, Anthony.” The arm around his shoulder relaxed. “Where should I start? That Justin found you hanging around Whitehall? Your degree in sending and cracking secret messages? The way you looked at me when Michael called me Dickhead, or when I called Oliver the Groundskeeper? Your shiny new wand? You’re not exactly deep undercover.”

Anthony didn’t say anything. Nothing he could say could make this any better. He almost wished he was bugged, and that Aubrey knew his exact location so he could send an extraction team to get him out of there.

“Don’t worry,” Zacharias said, “I’m not going to tell anyone. Justin’s a spy. He’s spying on the Muggle government for us. I’m a spy. I mean, who do you think recruited Justin?”

Resolute, Anthony kept his mouth shut, looking straight ahead. Susan was drawing a new constellation on her map: “This one is Cygnus, the swan. Doesn’t it look majestic?”

Zacharias made an annoyed sound, withdrawing his arm. “Fine, don’t tell me. I don’t care. It’s war—we do what we have to. And… you’re here, you’re on our side. That’s all that matters to me.”

“You’re not going to blackmail me, are you?” Anthony said. He had no idea why he said it. The words just left his mouth.

Zacharias threw back his head and cackled.

It was at that moment Padma came back, sitting down on Anthony’s other side. “I left Rose with Ernie,” she said. “I know it’s early; he was only a little grumpy about it. What’s the joke?”

“No joke,” Zacharias said. He bumped his shoulder against Anthony’s. “Just good to have him back.”

Anthony was a fly caught in a sticky bead of sap, with no hope of living to see his prison become beautiful amber. He was going to die here.

 

* * *

 

Almost all the spells they taught at Hogwarts were derived from Latin. This was not to say they were all the spells in the world: Hogwarts was the tip of an iceberg of knowledge. Latin, though, was the beloved of any archaic institution in the Isles. England had gone to war with itself over the right for their holy book to be kept in Latin, away from the eyes of the people. Similarly, long before the four founders of Hogwarts came together determined to educate the masses, it was already set in stone that their students would cast their spells in the language of their conquerors.

Anthony loved Latin. It had a sound to it that you couldn’t hear in any language spoken today, even the ones that evolved from it. All of his ancestors had been conquered by the Romans at some point; it didn’t bear thinking about. It was like that with the universities too, this self-conscious cloistering in borrowed tradition: graduation ceremonies at Oxford were conducted in Latin.

They gave him two tickets to the ceremony, for guests of his choosing. Anthony didn’t even have to think about it before cornering Justin and Zacharias one evening and saying, “I want to steal you away for a day. Somewhere the war can’t find us.”

Zacharias raised an eyebrow. Justin opened his mouth to say yes before he even knew what he was agreeing to; Anthony had to cut him off.

“It’s my graduation,” Anthony explained. “I have two tickets for—”

With a start, Anthony realised that he had not even thought to ask his parents. Two tickets for family or friends. When had he chosen nostalgia over the real, tangible life he’d been living? His parents would be furious they were missing his graduation. They were Muggles. This was the only part of Anthony’s life they had access to. Now he was going to have to break it to them that he was disappearing again: magic had come to take him back.

“Oh, how exciting,” Justin said. “I’m not sure, though… I would’ve attended Cambridge, if I weren’t whisked away by Hogwarts. We would’ve been rivals.” He didn’t quite pause long enough for effect before giving up: “I’m only kidding—of course we’ll come!”

“Don’t speak for me,” Zacharias said. But after a moment he said, “Obviously I’m coming.”

They were obtuse, both of them, but Anthony supposed that was why he loved them—even if a part of him was only inviting Zacharias in case he had yet to settle on blackmail.

It was at that point that Anthony became aware of a fourth presence in the room. Terry was hovering by the doorway. He and Anthony caught each other’s eyes and swapped nervous but piercing looks. At last Terry said, “Where are you going?”

“You’re not invited,” Zacharias said snippily. Some things never changed.

“It’s a Muggle… party… thing,” Anthony said. Despite his best efforts, he was not handling it much better than Zacharias had. “I’m really sorry, I only had two spare tickets.”

Terry pulled a face. “No, yeah, I understand. That’s—it’s fine.”

“Next time,” Anthony said.

“Sounds nice. To get away from it all, for a bit.”

“I’ll be sure to invite you.”

Anthony finally looked away, and when he looked back, Terry was gone.

There was only one thing less awkward than explaining it to Terry, and that was Anthony’s conversation with his parents about the matter. This involved him confessing three things, in a reverse of the order they’d occurred: he had invited friends to his graduation; he was hanging out with his Hogwarts friends again; he was doing magic again. He didn’t explain the spying or the rebellion. His parents were Muggles—they wouldn’t get it. They knew about the war and they assumed it must have ended, for him to be able to go back. Anthony didn’t want to correct them.

So Dr. Goldstein graduated with his friends by his side. It was a summer day lit up by a clear sky, spotted with a few Turner-perfect clouds. He dressed in a nice suit and covered it up with robes and a funny hat—he looked like a twat but he felt like a wizard. Elated.

After the ceremony they found a quiet patch of grass between beneath a tree that dappled the ground with shade. Anthony would have to pack up his room and move his things to London soon—he was still searching for a place—and he had yet to break it to his supervisor that he would not be pursuing a career in academia. He would have gone down that path if the magical world hadn’t sunk its claws back into him. He could’ve been a postdoc at some respectable university on the continent, far-flung enough that most days he wouldn’t even think of Hogwarts. Instead, here he was.

These things could wait. For now, he had a picnic basket and a bottle of champagne, friends by his side, an afternoon where he didn’t have to worry about anything at all.

“Little known fact,” Zacharias said, pouring himself more champagne than he needed, “that the standard Muggle university garb you’re wearing today comes from wizards’ robes.”

Anthony had also poured himself more champagne than he needed. “How do you know that?”

“I read it.” And, grandly: “In a book.”

Justin said, “It makes sense. Oxford and Cambridge were established well before the Statute of Secrecy. A lot of the fashions from that time have lived on in our world.”

“Which one is _our world_?” Anthony asked.

Justin didn’t answer. He, like Anthony, came from one but had settled most thoroughly in the other. If he had made his choice, he was not going to admit to it.

At last, Zacharias said, “Oh, who gives a fuck? It’s a beautiful day. Let’s not think about any of that.”

Anthony wanted to think about it, wanted to ask, when will it end? When would the war be over, when would he be able to think about _our world_ without fear? Until then, whenever it was, all they had were afternoons like this. Anthony downed what remained of his champagne and lay down, the grass tickling the back of his neck and knocking his graduation cap askew. He could not afford to forget for long, and he was damn well going to make the most of it.

 

* * *

 

Thing were rocky with his parents; Anthony rented a flat in London, near enough to home that he could walk there for dinner on Shabbos in fifteen minutes, but still undeniably his own space. The flat was furnished, and it even had a telly. For the first week Anthony watched the Muggle news religiously, but it started to wear on him with the War on Terror every night. Not that it wasn’t important to stay informed. It was just that he had enough of his own war to keep him more than occupied.

He went to work at Thames House every day. There were always more messages to be intercepted, and now he translated them at his desk, with Innogen or Robert or both of them looking over his shoulder. There were days when Aubrey said to Anthony, “You haven’t been to the DA in a while. Go to the DA.” Of course, Anthony had almost always been to the DA more recently than Aubrey assumed, because the DA was like a drug, and Anthony was barely resisting addiction. He had become a skilled Occlumens thanks to Innogen and none of them had a clue that he was living a double life. It left him more at ease, to think that he was a double agent on both sides.

At the end of the day, though, he still belonged to SOW. He was not telling SOW that he spent his spare time with the DA. He was not telling the DA that SOW knew their secrets and their movements.

Not all of them. Not all of them yet.

The first leaves in the Forbidden Forest were turning brown. Justin was busy at Number Ten, Zacharias was away on a mission, and just about everyone else was teaching a class. Anthony found Neville free, wandering the vegetable garden. “We have a week off while the gurdyroots in the greenhouse go through their stinking season,” he said. “I don’t have much to do when I’m not teaching.”

“I thought you were the leader of this operation,” Anthony said.

“It’s mostly ceremonial.” Neville rubbed the back of his head self-consciously. “I don’t actually go out and fight—well, not that much, anyway. I mostly take care of the running of this place. We have so many people living here. I’m no good with numbers. It’s a lot. And it’s not just students. We have people who’ve graduated but have no place else to go. Almost every Muggleborn younger than us is here, and then some. Someone has to keep an eye on them.”

“So, not ceremonial at all.”

Neville laughed, and looked away. “Anthony, this castle has kept you at a distance. It’s through no fault of your own. A lot of the younger ones aren’t so trusting. I’m sure you understand. Now I want to show you what we really do here.”

Knowing Neville, it would be something like maintaining the castle’s sanitation system. Anthony didn’t get his hopes up.

They came to a glade some way away from the castle. It was a small class with Ginny at the head, and behind her a line of effigies dressed in hooded black robes. Ginny gave Neville a sharp look, and he inclined his head in a nod. She nodded back; that was that.

“These are our recently-graduated seventh years,” Neville whispered to Anthony. Anthony did the maths in his head: they had graduated without ever taking a class inside Hogwarts. “They’re getting ready for their first sight of the action. Next week, we’re taking a trip to Malfoy Manor.”

Ginny returned to the class. “As I was saying, this spell is dangerous. You practise on the dummies or not at all. You make sure your friends are out of the way. You keep your other hand behind your back. Understand?”

The seventh years indicated their agreement. Anthony thought it passingly interesting that none of them mumbled, or ducked their heads and nodded. They all spoke up. They said: Yes. We understand.

“Good,” Ginny said. She turned to face the effigies and pointed her wand. “ _Sectumsempra_!”

Anthony didn’t know the spell. It wasn’t a Hogwarts spell, nor in his new textbook. He saw immediately why: the spell shot from Ginny’s wand and slashed at the effigy in a myriad places, cutting its robes to tatters and severing the canvas underneath, foam spilling out through the wounds and onto the forest floor. It was gruesome. On a real person it would be devastating.

“We have a lot of these for you to practise on,” Ginny said, and cast a spell to duplicate each of the remaining effigies. “They don’t repair after this one. Let me show you again.”

This time when it was cast, Anthony flinched. There was only one kind of spell damage you couldn’t reverse. “This is dark magic.”

Neville sighed. “Yes, it is.”

“And you’re—you’re okay with that?”

Some of the seventh years were looking at them now, annoyed. Yes, their faces said, they were okay with it.

“I don’t like it either, but so long as you’re working with us, you have to get used to our methods.”

“And that’s sinking to their level?” Anthony felt ill. He hadn’t understood why Aubrey seemed so distressed that the DA were fighting back. Now he wondered if Aubrey had told him all he knew.

“It’s something we learnt early on,” Neville said. “You can’t put out a forest fire with _Aguamenti_.”

“Once you put the fire out,” Anthony said, “do you turn your flamethrowers on the people who set it?”

“Would you want other people to start setting fires?”

Anthony wasn’t stupid. He was alive for one reason and that reason was that, eventually, people fought the Nazis. They were put on trial and they were locked up. Anthony stewed on it a moment longer before he found the source of his discontent. Quietly, he said, “They’re kids.”

“We were kids,” Neville said. “Why do you think we chose the name Dumbledore’s Army?”

“I was there when it was chosen. It was a joke about reactionaries believing that Dumbledore had started a secret army at school. It wasn’t meant to be _real_.”

Neville took his arm and led him away from the class. They were making a scene. “I get it,” he said, “you missed out on everything that’s happened since. And the fact that it happened to you… it’s beyond unfair. I need you to understand that this is what we’re fighting for. We’re fighting so that what happened to you doesn’t happen to another person ever again. There are Muggleborns still in Azkaban. Eight years and they haven’t—”

“You can just walk out of Azkaban!” Now that they were alone again Anthony raised his voice. “You can just walk out. The Ministry don’t talk about it because they don’t want anyone to know, and it’s hard to clear your mind to the extent you need to get past the Dementors.”

“You should talk to Luna about that,” Neville said, the corner of his mouth quirking upwards.

Anthony shook his head. “Sorry. I need to leave. I—I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

Neville didn’t try to stop him. He had, after all, said _when_. Not _if_.

 

* * *

 

Anthony knocked on the door to Aubrey’s office. Aubrey took a moment to answer; perhaps he was busy. Perhaps he was ignoring Anthony, in which case Anthony wouldn’t blame him. The DA’s messages were getting sparser, and Anthony hadn’t brought back any new information in a while.

That was about to change.

At last, Aubrey said, “Come in.”

“I found out two things yesterday,” Anthony said.

“Aren’t you glad I sent you?”

Anthony nodded. He took the seat across from Aubrey. “I know who their Orderly Friend is. It’s Percy Weasley, who came to—”

“Yes, yes, I know who he is,” Aubrey said. “How do you know it’s him?”

“I overheard it mentioned that he works at the Ministry.” Not quite, but it would do as an excuse. “Also, he has a partner who’s an active member of the DA, and seems to have been for some time, so it would make sense that he has dual allegiances.”

“Is he telling them anything about the Order’s work?”

Anthony barely knew what the Order did, apart from keep an eye on the government in case things went south. “I don’t think so. Just the Ministry.”

“Well, that’s something.” Aubrey sat back. “And what was the second thing you found out?”

“Their next attack will be on Malfoy Manor. Next week. I don’t know what day precisely. Sorry.”

In an instant, Aubrey was leaning forward again. “No, no, don’t apologise. This is good information. We don’t have a detail on Malfoy Manor—the DA first attacked them about two years ago, and we didn’t have the knowledge or resources to provide surveillance in case of a follow-up. Now we have both, thanks to you. We’ll stop them in their tracks.”

“What’s at Malfoy Manor?” Anthony asked. What he really wanted to know was: is it so important to stop them? He remembered Draco Malfoy from Hogwarts; he was a prick. The whole family were right-wing maniacs, to hear it told. Would it be such a loss?

“We have reason to believe He Who Must Not Be Named spends a lot of time there,” Aubrey said. “We have a plant, but as you can imagine he doesn’t get out often enough to pass things on to us.”

“Of course,” Anthony said.

“I know what you’re thinking, and you’d be right. We don’t have any reason to stop the attack other than protecting our spy. But think also of the information that we’ve yet to gain. Dumbledore’s Army are an erratic sort. We are going to do this sensibly, make no rash moves.”

They were silent a moment. At last Anthony said, “There’s one other thing.”

“You spoil me.”

“There’s an army. I mean—I know it seems obvious, but—they’re training the students to fight. Yes, it’s a school, but they’re cadets, not students. They’re learning dark spells I didn’t even know existed.”

Aubrey paused to take this in. He looked thoughtful, not at all shocked like Anthony had been. Maybe it really was just that he had more experience. He was smarter about these things. He saw the word “army” and knew it meant army, no matter how much of a joke it’d been at the time.

“They’re children,” Anthony said, as thought the more he said it, the more people might understand why he was so alarmed.

“You were a child when you were taken by the Ministry,” Aubrey said. “You were a child when you fought your way out with nothing but your fists. Innogen told me that story. You may berate her for that lapse in judgement all you like.”

“I don’t—”

“Yes, they are raising a child army, and I thank you for bringing this to my attention. But, Anthony, don’t let that be what grabs your moral outrage. Think of how they’re setting themselves back by going at it with this violent approach. Think about how much stronger our cause will be when the DA know they can’t get away with this any longer.”

Anthony had so many thoughts he didn’t know what he was thinking. He focused on the wall behind Aubrey’s head and cleared his mind. “You’re right. I’ll go back. I’ll find out when they’re going to Malfoy Manor, the exact date and time, so you don’t have to waste resources.”

“Very good.”

Anthony got up to leave. He was doing well. He was helping the war effort. He was partway through turning the door handle when Aubrey spoke again.

“One more thing. When the DA go to Malfoy Manor… I want you to be there.”

 

* * *

 

In the end, Anthony didn’t have to ask to accompany the DA to Malfoy Manor. Zacharias insisted.

“I know you can do my sort of work,” he said. “I’ve seen you cast a spell or two. You’re steel.”

It’s because I can clear my mind a little too well now, Anthony did not say. “I think you’re vastly overestimating my competence.”

“Only one way to find out.”

Yes, Anthony thought, that was his job too. He hadn’t been given any information about what the DA were doing. He could extrapolate from what he knew about their activities in the past, but it was dawning on him low little he had been told while he was with them. If Aubrey expected that the DA would immediately spill their secrets to a trusted old friend, he hadn’t counted on the fact that they functioned the same way as SOW did: information was a more precious currency than the pound or the galleon.

Anthony knew very little about SOW’s operations other than the one he was directly involved in. Despite that, he was clear on what Aubrey wanted from him at the DA’s attack on Malfoy Manor. He wanted more information. That’s what it was always about. Anthony had been working on his memorisation techniques; at the other end of the failed mission, he would be able to recount it in full.

That depended, of course, on what the DA let him see.

Anthony stayed overnight before the attack, and woke before the sun. It was September the first. Anthony didn’t think about what that date meant, because he knew that if he thought about it he would be too overcome to focus on anything. Though it was early, there was already a flurry of movement around the DA. Susan the wordsmith, Dean the artist, and a few of the younger members were putting the finishing touches on the propaganda they’d distribute to the new students, working with maps of the castle to make sure they knew where to go and where to avoid. The maps were spectacular creations, alive with floating dots, followed by the names of everyone walking around that area—though Hogwarts was empty now, it would soon be an obstacle course. Anthony asked who invented these maps, and George Weasley answered him: “James Potter.”

“And some others,” said Angelina Johnson, before Anthony had time to take that in, “but there’s no time to go over it now. Come on, Anthony.”

Only a few of them were going to Malfoy Manor. Anthony left with Angelina, Zacharias, and Ginny. “Once we’re out of Hogwarts grounds,” Ginny said, “codenames only. Got it?”

“Anthony doesn’t have one yet,” Zacharias said. “Allow me to suggest—”

Ginny kicked Zacharias in the shin, though it was amicable. “He has to pick his own. That’s the rule.”

Ginny’s codename was Firework; it was not hard to see why she’d gone for that. Angelina, true to the disproportionate amount of Gryffindor spirit in the DA, had chosen Lioness. Zacharias said, “People were already calling me Dickhead in greeting,” and Anthony couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking. He wished Zacharias had finished his sentence; he wanted to know what other people thought suited him. He didn’t know a single thing about himself. Not in this world.

And maybe that was it. “Oxford,” he said. “I’ll be Oxford.”

They congregated around a Portkey atop a hill, shrouded by fog. Anthony began crafting his memory by grounding himself in the present: dew on the grass and the grass parting beneath the soles of his shoes, the gentle slope of the hilly countryside around Hogsmeade, the train tracks in the distance, soon to be leading a new group of children to the site of the longest-waged battle in the war.

The Portkey was a battered old briefcase. “This is a one-way ticket,” Ginny said. “We go at seven on the hour. Lioness, is your watch synchronised?”

Synchronising a Muggle watch meant waiting painstakingly for the second hand to hit the hour, pulling out the crown, and sitting next to another clock, ready to push the crown back in when the minute ticked over. To synchronise her watch, Angelina tapped her wand against the Portkey and then to the wand, muttering _Concurritur_.

Angelina counted them down, from T minus ten seconds. Zacharias’ hand hovered over the handle of the briefcase; the rest of them would grab onto it elsewhere. Anthony closed his eyes and listened to the numbers. He told himself that this was all going to go according to plan. If it became plain he thought otherwise, his cover would be dead and gone.

Just as Angelina said, “Three,” Anthony opened his eyes and found he was looking right at Zacharias. Zacharias knew he was spying on them, though not for whom, and not the nature of what he told them. Had he guessed that Anthony passed on information about this attack? Did that make him any less determined to get it done?

“Two,” Angelina said. There was no time to brood over ethical dilemmas. Either Anthony was doing this or he was not. His fingertips were millimetres above the briefcase. If he didn’t clear his mind fast he’d be nauseous.

“One.”

The Portkey activated at their touch and they were pulled through space to a country lane somewhere in Wiltshire. Here it was still grey but noticeably warmer, and the leaves were different shades of green. A sliver of sun came through the clouds, cutting a line through their group.

Zacharias clutched the briefcase to his chest. “Right,” he said, “Firework and I are going in. Lioness, Oxford, you’re backup. Follow but don’t come in further than the perimeter. Lioness, you know what to do if you see trouble.”

“Let’s get this over and done with,” Ginny said—though she looked like she was excited for it.

It was a bit of a walk to Malfoy Manor; of course they hadn’t travelled to the front gates. The day was warming up and they all wore layer upon layer of Disillusionment charm like a heavy coat. Duelling like this would be sluggish. If it came to that.

There was someone waiting for them further along the walk. Anthony recognised him as an older version of the Blaise Zabini in his memory, leaning casually against a tall hedge as though there was nothing untoward about his being out here alone in the middle of nowhere on a morning like this. Ginny called to him, “Grass?”

Grass. The DA’s other Ministry plant, a snake in the proverbial.

“Not so loud,” Zabini said. “We may have a problem.”

Oh, shit, Anthony thought, SOW were already there.

Then Zabini said, “It’s Draco.”

“Draco Malfoy?” Ginny said, though it was obvious. She said his name like a curse. He didn’t warrant a codename—ergo, he wasn’t on their side.

“He’s got friends over,” Zabini said. “And I don’t mean his old friends from the You Know Who Youth. I recognised one of them, briefly. It was Tonks.”

“Tonks?” Anthony said. In an instant, everyone was looking at him. Hastily, he improvised: “I mean, is that a codename?”

“Merlin,” Zabini said, as though seeing him for the first time, “I thought you were dead.”

Zacharias put a hand on Anthony’s shoulder. “He’s with us. Forgive him his newness. And no, Tonks is not a codename. She’s a member of the Order.”

“If Malfoy’s talking to the Order,” Angelina said, “then—”

“No.” Ginny gave each of them in turn a fierce glare. “We’re already running behind. If there’s collateral, there’s collateral. It’s only the Order.”

“Malfoy’s information could be valuable,” Zacharias said. “If our Orderly Friend can get in touch with him, we could get a second foot in the door of the inner circle. That’s practically a whole person.”

Ginny said, “There’s no time to argue the point. Grass, stay with Lioness and Oxford; they’re running backup. We’ll be fast.”

“You’d better be,” Zabini said. “I don’t want to stick around to deal with the fallout.”

Neither did Anthony.

 

* * *

 

It would have been suspicious if Anthony returned uninjured. He had a gash on his left arm, just below the shoulder. It stung like a bitch and wouldn’t stop bleeding. Angelina and Zabini, who’d been with him, both came off worse—reasonably, this could be explained by the fact that they were both more experienced duellists, and took the fore to deal with the agents unknown who’d interrupted their operation and charged past them at the gates, incapacitating Angelina halfway through sending out a distress signal. Anthony had not known she was going to be the one with the flares before that morning. He hadn’t done that to her.

There weren’t enough beds in the hospital for all four of them—Zabini had come back, been patched up fast, and left right away, to avoid suspicion with his bosses at the Ministry. Ginny’s legs were both broken and she lay writhing with a bottle of homebrew Skele-Gro in her hands, downing the whole thing in progressively bigger gulps. Zacharias still couldn’t move his hands, though Parvati was working on it. In the end, Anthony had carried back the briefcase with the bomb inside it. Detonating it at the gates would do nothing. It would not even make a statement.

While they recovered, they were joined by Neville, Ron, and Hermione, returned at last from her extended mission.

“I just don’t understand it,” Neville said. “You’re sure you don’t know who attacked you?”

“They were under as many charms as we were,” Ginny said. She paused to finally finish drinking her potion. “Yuck. They were—ugh, that’s bad—they were totally faceless. Really… weird duelling style. They definitely weren’t Death Eaters.”

“Death Eaters go straight for the Unforgivables,” Zacharias said. “These guys wanted a fight.”

“I thought maybe Order,” Angelina said, “since Blaise told us that Draco Malfoy was meeting with some of their number.”

Ron interrupted her: “Hold on, you can’t just say that offhand. Blaise told you what?”

So Angelina recounted exactly what Zabini had told them—which explained rather well, in hindsight, what he was doing there despite not being assigned to the mission. Anthony sat and listened, disquieted. There was, of course, more complexity to this whole state of affairs than he could possibly know. Sitting in the hospital bed holding a compress of dittany on his arm, he didn’t feel like much of a spy. He felt like one of the first year students at the Hogwarts in the Forbidden Forest: wide-eyed and clueless, a stranger in a world that was fighting a war to keep them out of it.

“So Blaise knew we were going to be there,” Hermione said, “otherwise he wouldn’t have come to meet you. Who else knew? Surely nobody outside this room?”

Neville nodded. “That’s right. We kept this one just as quiet as all the others.”

“That means someone in this room is a spy.” Ginny didn’t look at Anthony but he felt the heat of her gaze anyway. “Unless any of you mentioned it in passing?”

“Someone could’ve overheard around the castle,” Zacharias said. He _was_ looking at Anthony, though not accusingly. What was that about?

“I don’t think there’s a spy,” Neville said. “I can personally vouch for the integrity of everyone in this room.”

Could he?

“However,” he continued, “I will personally investigate this matter. I’ll talk to Blaise about it. Someone might’ve followed him out of Malfoy Manor.”

“Unlikely,” Ginny said.

Neville gave her a look. “It’s the most likely explanation we have. Unless you really want to accuse everyone in this room?”

“I’d only be accusing one person.”

“By casting your net over all of us, it could be any of us.”

“This is stupid,” Zacharias said. “We have to find another target for this bloody bomb and I can’t even feel my fucking fingers. I’m going to get something to eat. Anthony—be my hands?”

“If he’s recovered enough,” Parvati said.

Anthony recognised this for what it was. An irrefutable offer to walk to the gallows. He forced a smile. “I’m much better. Really, don’t worry about me.”

And if he was lucky they wouldn’t worry that he was spying on them, either.

In the kitchen, it was just the two of them. Zacharias said, “You bastard. It was your people, wasn’t it?”

No point denying it now. “Yes.”

“You really fucked us over.” Zacharias laughed—Anthony did not feel like he was in on the joke. “I’m just kidding. Can you imagine if a bombing at Malfoy Manor actually meant something? Fucking Merlin, I don’t know what Neville was thinking. Maybe it’s time for a mutiny.”

“You’re not… mad at me?”

“Oh, I’m mad,” Zacharias said, “but insofar as you put my life in danger. As for the, you know, the cause, it’s not a huge deal. We’ll recover. There are plenty of Death Eaters we’ve yet to target.” He stopped, but he was not done. He gave Anthony a long look. “I’ll just have to be more careful around you in the future.”

Anthony’s stomach turned over. “Did you want me to get you something to eat or not?”

“Don’t worry about it. I think I’m starting to get some feeling back.”

 

* * *

 

Anthony could not feel a single thing. He sat in a chair opposite Aubrey and Innogen, with Robert to his left. It may as well have been thin air keeping him upright.

“Amazing work,” Aubrey said. “This is an excellent amount of detail. I knew we could rely on you.”

Anthony had been up until one in the morning writing out his report. Parvati had urged him to stay at the DA headquarters overnight, but he couldn’t, not in good conscience, not when he had a report to write that would sell them all to the Muggle government.

“I’m glad,” Anthony said, “that it was useful.”

If anyone picked up on his strangled tone, they didn’t say anything.

Innogen said, “You duelled well, too. Very convincingly on their side. I feel bad about your arm, but I think you understand why I had to do it. Is it healing?”

In response, Anthony rolled up his sleeve. The gash had bled out for a while and, although magic could close the wound, it could not alleviate the swelling around the scar, nor the indentation around the swelling, nor the blossoming purple and yellow bruising.

“Your first war wound,” Robert said appreciatively. “Wear it with pride.”

Anthony didn’t want to wear it at all. He wanted to cut his arm off so he didn’t have to think about it. He rolled his sleeve down quickly. “So that was you,” he said to Innogen.

“Yes,” she said. “We got there just in time, by the sounds of it. We weren’t expecting three of you at the gate, but we didn’t really have to hurt you. The main problem was tough seeing through your Disillusionment charms.”

“How did you do it?” Anthony asked, even though he didn’t want to know.

Robert frowned. “Imperfectly.”

“We picked up the signal of your wand’s magic, so we know which one you were after you’d all cast,” Innogen explained. “We’ll know who the other two were as soon as Bertram lets us read your report.”

“You won’t be reading the report,” Aubrey said. “It’s for the best you don’t know. What if you’re up against them again? One of them dealt you quite a nasty blow, Innogen. The last thing I want is for you to go after them thinking you can seek revenge.”

Innogen’s face was unreadable. “I understand.”

“And what about—” Zacharias and Ginny. Anthony didn’t know their side of the story because they both knew better than telling it. “—the two on the inside? How did you get them?”

“That was me,” Aubrey said, with no deficit of pride. “Did you like the finger-freezing spell? That’s one of my own inventions.”

Anthony thought of Zacharias saying, Be my hands. “Yes. It was impressive.”

“Well, the spell got him to drop the bomb, and I would’ve grabbed it if it weren’t for the other one. Tenacious, even on two broken legs. The important part, I suppose is that I spooked them off, and no harm was done to Malfoy Manor. The world turns another day.”

“What would have happened?” Anthony said. He was being impulsive and he’d hate himself for it later. “If it had gone ahead, I mean? Would it really have set us back? By all accounts, they’d already bombed Malfoy Manor once before, and that neither ended the war nor worsened it.”

His question was met with silence. His colleagues passed it around between themselves as a concerned look before, inevitably, it landed on Aubrey.

“Anthony… I know it may not seem like it to someone who’s used to the brutishness and intimidation of Muggle politics, but for us, appearance is everything. The opponents of He Who Must Not Be Named’s regime cannot be seen to resort to the same tactics. We must be a paragon, for moderates to see us as an alternative. Had this attack on Malfoy Manor progressed, on the first of September of all days, it would have sent a clear signal. Malfoy Manor, whatever you think of its owners, is one of the most respected old institutions of the magical world. Hogwarts too. We cannot frame them as the enemy; not yet.”

Who was going to tell him, Anthony wondered? Who was going to tell him that it was the same everywhere, Muggle or magical? Aubrey acted like he was so pro-Muggle but at the end of the day he still thought wizards were better, by virtue of their wands. He thought that the Malfoys stood for something good, that it made sense to cling to the boots of tradition while it dangled you off the edge of a cliff, thinking that the maintenance of the status quo might save you after all.

At some point, somebody had to put their foot down.

“You understand,” Aubrey said, “don’t you? The greater good, and all that.”

Anthony was not that someone. Not yet. But he knew who those people were and he was going to do what he could, in the situation he was in. He knew they would not win the war with one person playing both sides, but what choice did he have?

 

* * *

 

It was wrong, Anthony going back to the DA after that. But no spy thought about the ethical considerations of their profession when they were coaxed into it. This was the easiest way to recruit someone: find something they held dear and dangle it just out of arm’s reach. They would go to great lengths to get their hands on it. Say you dangled a carrot on the stick; the spy might use a sharp, powerful knife to cut the rope holding the carrot, even knowing that one wrong swipe might slice the carrot clean in two.

Anthony had made a dent. He had not broken the DA, thank god, but they were scarred and it was his fault.

When he arrived at the castle, he saw Percy sitting on one of the long couches in the large communal space, with Oliver’s arm around his shoulders. Percy had clearly been crying. He looked up at the sound of someone coming in and said, “Anthony?”

This is it, Anthony thought. He’s going to kill me.

“I thought you were with the Order,” Anthony said. Concern, sincerity. He was doing his best. “Is everything alright?”

“No, not exactly,” Percy said, his voice shaky. “I suppose one double agent recognises another. It’s alright. Oliver knows you’re spying on MI5 for us; we don’t keep secrets well, the two of us.”

There was nobody else around to hear them; Anthony panicked anyway. Percy was oblivious, sharing a calm, familiar smile with Oliver. They thought it went the other way. Anthony was not going to die just yet.

Percy continued, “I spy on the Order for the DA, and for both of them I work at the Ministry. One of my superiors in the Order saw me meeting with the DA’s other plant in the Ministry, to catch up on that failed attack you were present for. I don’t know how they knew Blaise was DA. Maybe they guessed based on his age, or the fact that we work in totally different departments and had no reason to be in the same room. I don’t know. I’m lying low for a while.”

“That’s horrible,” Anthony said. It was. “I’m sorry.” He was.

“We’re trying to think of the positives,” Oliver said, “like all this time we’re suddenly getting to spend together.”

Percy laughed weakly. Anthony was intruding on this moment; he was spared by something he might otherwise have dreaded.

“Anthony,” Michael said, his voice frosty. “A word.”

“Of course,” Anthony said. He gave Percy and Oliver one last smile—see, I’m on your side—before following Michael out of the room. Michael led him out of the castle entirely and into the greenhouses; there was no lesson going on, and it was the perfect enclosed space to have the kind of conversation you didn’t want anyone to overhear.

Michael opened fast and took no prisoners: “I know you’re the spy.”

“What?” Anthony said. He was good at this, now. “I don’t know what you’re—what spy?”

“You’re a good Occlumens,” Michael said, “I’ll give you that. I can’t get inside your head. I had to work it out myself.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No? Then let me jog your memory.”

Michael walked around behind a tray of spring bulbs, new green shoots poking through the soil. He trailed a finger along the top of them.

“What we have here is so delicate,” he said. “The DA works because of the absolute loyalty of all our members. We’ve never had one of our bombings anticipated. Never. When things go wrong it’s—” He stopped, touched a hand to his remaining eye. “We know why things go wrong. It’s all under control. Four days ago—that was out of our hands. Neville doesn’t think so, but the rest of us know. Someone’s sharing our secrets.”

“And you think it’s me?” Anthony wanted to laugh, to underline the absurdity of this statement, but he couldn’t. He had been found out once, and now he was being found out again. He couldn’t think of himself as a spy if he was so fucking _bad_ at it.

Michael looked right through him. “I know it’s you. You said you were asking me about the encryption because of your degree, but I know it was so you could intercept our messages. Malfoy Manor convinced me. None of us knew about the attack until after, unless we were there. It could only have been you.”

“You’re being irrational,” Anthony said. “Neville said it was likely Zabini was followed; he was an unplanned factor.”

“Neville this, Neville that; I don’t know how you managed to pull a fast one over him, and over everyone else, but you can’t fool me. I know you too well for that.”

“You think you know me?” Now Anthony was annoyed. “I came back after eight years to find that you’d specialised in the same area as me, only to find you had absolutely no interest in bonding over it. I don’t know you. Why should you know me?”

“You’re right. I forgot you disappeared for eight years—”

“The Ministry snapped my wand!”

“—came back a traitor—”

“Which you can’t prove—”

“—and you’re still acting like it was all academic! Just admit that you want to decrypt our messages!”

“I don’t,” Anthony shouted. “I don’t need to. I worked it out without magic, before I even came back here. That was what my degree was for. I really just… I really wanted to know how the spell works. For my own bloody interest.”

“So you admit that you’re the spy.” Michael made a fist around one of the spring bulbs and yanked it out of the soil. “Can’t resist an opportunity to show off, can you?”

“What are you going to do?” Anthony said. He spoke bravely, though he didn’t feel it. “Turn me in? Kill me?”

“I’m going to—”

The door to the greenhouse opened.

“I thought I heard you, Michael,” Neville said.

“Sorry about the daffodil,” Michael said, dropping the bulb back into the soil and hastily patting it over, not that it would do any good.

“Don’t worry about it,” Neville said. “I’m glad I’ve got you two together. My two favourite cryptographers.”

Michael was Anthony’s least favourite cryptographer right now. He forced the pain back down and turned to smile at Neville. “You’ve already got Michael. I don’t know why you’d need both of us.”

Neville grimaced. “We’re going to need all the help we can get for this one. How much do you know about the security at Gringotts?”

Anthony had been to Gringotts precisely once, with his parents, before he started at Hogwarts. They needed to exchange pounds for galleons. Anthony wanted to open a bank account, but his parents hadn’t let him. At the time, he hadn’t understood it; his father, still baffled by the magical world, said, “They force them into the role of the banker, then they treat them like hoarders for it. Where have we seen that before?” After that, he had gone to the exchange bureau lower down Diagon Alley, staffed by wizards.

“It’s the highest security in the country, outside of Hogwarts,” Michael said. “And Azkaban, I suppose.”

“Actually,” Anthony piped up, “you can just walk right out of Azkaban, if you know how.”

“Okay, Luna,” Michael said, rolling his eyes—their animosity was not forgotten, but momentarily by the wayside. “The point is, you’d have to be insane to try to break into Gringotts.”

“I could use a little insanity right now,” Neville said. “I know it’s outlandish, but this is based on very good intel, so you’ll just have to trust me. I don’t think we’re going to be able to pull this off without your help. Both of you. Are you in?”

“Of course,” Anthony said.

Michael’s jaw hung open for a moment before he got himself together. “Of course I’m in.”

“Right, then.” Neville glanced at Michael’s hand, resting on the tray of daffodils and covered in dirt. He smiled reassuringly at them. “I’ll leave you to two to… whatever you were up to in here.”

Once he was gone, Anthony found it a lot easier to breathe, despite the carefully controlled greenhouse climate. He turned to Michael, who was looking at his hand like he couldn’t believe what he’d done to that poor bulb.

“You didn’t dob me in.”

“If Neville says we need you, we need you.” Michael brushed his hands together. “I’m not happy with it. I’d do anything for the DA. To fight. Now you’re stuck with this; you work for us, as well as whoever your other bosses are. And if you ruin whatever this Gringotts mission is, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

“Should I be thanking you?” Anthony said, amused.

“No,” Michael said. “Thank my sense of the greater good.”

Now, where had Anthony heard that one before?

 

* * *

 

London grew rainy with the onslaught of autumn. This might have bothered Anthony, if he were doing anything other than staying at home.

He hadn’t been back to the DA’s headquarters since his argument with Michael. As curious as he was about the Gringotts heist, and as interested as Aubrey would be, Anthony was caught between a rock and a hard place. It was almost a relief to realise that, at the end of the day, the thing he valued more than anything else was his own life. He was happy to live in isolation and indecision if it meant he didn’t have to betray either the people who’d brought him back into the magical world or the people who comprehensively owned his heart.

Of course, he had to go into work every now and then. Otherwise Aubrey would grow suspicious. Anthony told him that he was with the DA the rest of the time—which was true, in a world where “with the DA” meant “sitting around and feeling sorry for myself because I’ll never really be one of them.”

And there were more messages to decrypt: the code had changed, or rather, Michael had changed the code, knowing that Anthony had worked it out. Anthony had tried the spell that the rest of the DA knew only to find that it must now be a different spell, one which everyone in the DA knew, except for him. Michael had made the code itself more complex, too. Cracking it would take longer. Aubrey was upset, though he was very good at not letting it show. Anthony was doing his level best with the code. He wanted to know what was going on as much as the rest of SOW, if not for the same reasons.

It was early October and it was bucketing down outside Thames House; Anthony had taken the tube and he was running late. He was dreading having to face Aubrey. Yesterday he’d been worried he wasn’t pretending to spend enough time with the DA; today he was paranoid that Aubrey thought he was stalling on the decryption because he was spending too _much_ time with the DA and had gone native.

That was partly true. Maybe. Anthony wasn’t certain. There was no need for certainty in his self-imposed exile. It was so much safer than espionage.

The first thing Aubrey said to him that morning was, “You’ve been spending less time with the DA.”

Anthony had the right idea of it, yesterday. He wished he was still worried about that. If he was, he would’ve had a ready answer. “Er, I suppose so… ? To be honest, I’ve lost track of time recently.”

Aubrey clicked his tongue. “Poor form, but you’ll recover. I need you back among them, Anthony, and we can’t afford to wait for you to crack this new code. You still have one more task to complete before I give you any more.”

“Harry Potter.” Anthony sighed. “I know. But I’ve never seen him around there. No-one even mentions his name.”

“I wonder if they’ve put a taboo on it,” Aubrey mused. “Either way. Go back tomorrow. Bring him to us, if not in flesh then in spirit.”

The next day Anthony stayed in bed until midday. He had a missed call from Aubrey on his phone. “Anthony,” he said, “I really hope you’re with the DA today.” Then he hung up.

Anthony called him back, affecting a scratchy throat. “I’m not feeling well today. I’m sure I’ll be back on my feet tomorrow; just give me today to get over my cold.”

“You know, we have potions for that,” Aubrey said, skeptical. “I can brew something for you; give me your address and I’ll drop it off.”

“There’s no need—”

“I worry about you.”

Yes, and that was precisely the problem. Anthony liked Aubrey, he liked working with him. Aubrey had given him magic again. He just wished working with Aubrey didn’t mean working against his friends. Anthony’s future was locked in a stalemate with itself. Inaction was the most he could manage.

His phone rang again later that day. This time he didn’t answer it.

 

* * *

 

So this was where the war ended: not on a battlefield and not with a bombing, but in Anthony’s London flat, in front of the telly. He had stuck his wand out of sight, out of mind, and he was curled up on the sofa with a bowl of ice cream and a bag of crisps. He absently dipped the crisps in the ice cream while Holby City ran in the background. It was disgusting. He didn’t care.

He had not been in contact with either SOW or the DA. The choice he had to make weighed terribly on his mind. He either stayed undercover in the DA as an operative for SOW, or he devoted himself to the DA and counted his SOW work as undercover. Either way he whispered secrets down one channel and passed on misinformation to the other.

There was a third option—he thought of Percy, curled around himself and cut out of his own life. SOW didn’t know where the DA’s headquarters were. Anthony had not told them and nobody had yet cared to ask; perhaps that was considered poor form. Anthony could return to the Forbidden Forest seeking sanctuary, and on some level he knew that the DA would take him, whether or not he confessed his crimes. They would open the door for him and he would never leave. Now that sounded like a nice life.

But that would mean making the decision. Committing to it. Anthony didn’t know where he stood, where someone in his position was meant to stand. It was so much easier to keep watching telly and eating garbage.

October droned on like this and November loomed on the horizon. London winter was not so bad; a forest in Scotland would be far worse. There weren’t any television sets at the DA’s headquarters. Then again, what was on the television wasn’t particularly compelling. Pros and cons. If he lived in a place as busy as the DA’s castle, there would be plenty of people to judge him for dipping crisps in ice cream. He doubted he’d even get a room to himself. London was looking better and better.

How had Anthony’s grand return to the magical world turned into this?

Rain beat down on his windows, a steady reminder that Earth would not cease to spin on its axis just because one stupid wizard couldn’t cope with being a spy. Then the tapping of the rain was joined by a knock at the door; it started slow and became frantic fast.

Anthony sat perfectly still. Plausible deniability—he wasn’t home, no, the sound was coming from the flat next door.

“Anthony?” Justin? “This is your address, isn’t it?”

Justin was with Zacharias: “For fuck’s sake, could you let us in? I put on Muggle clothes for this.”

If Anthony just sat here, they’d go away. Surely they would. He sat there for maybe five minutes, not moving, and if anything that only made them more determined. What got him at last was Zacharias idly saying, “If you don’t let us in, I’ll blast the door down. Now, imagine explaining that to your neighbours.”

Anthony slumped lower on the sofa and put his crisps and ice cream to one side. He muted the telly and went do the door.

“You look like shit,” Justin said cheerfully, as Anthony let them both in. “Been missing us that much?”

They dawdled by the door. There was no way Anthony could tell him the truth. Zacharias knew, but that was unavoidable, and neither of them had said anything to indicate that Justin was in on it, too. Instead, Anthony said, “How did you find me?”

Justin made a great show of rolling his eyes. “I work for the government, I know people. I put a word in the right ear and the right ear did a spot of digging and gave me your address. More to the point, why haven’t you been back?”

“I’ve been sick,” Anthony said. It was the same excuse he’d given Aubrey. “I don’t want to spread it.”

“If you’re hung up on what happened at Malfoy Manor,” Justin said, “nobody could’ve known that someone would follow Blaise out of the Manor. It’s not your fault.”

Anthony took a few seconds to process it. “That’s what happened?”

“Blaise found a tracking spell on his wand. Looks like someone in the Ministry was onto him. He’s lying low while Neville sorts it out.”

Though Anthony knew it was an impossibility, he felt like he’d crafted this lie to exonerate himself. Was he daydreaming? It had been SOW—hadn’t it? SOW told him it was their doing. Anthony was the one to tip them off. First Percy, and now Zabini; Anthony was responsible for cutting off both of the DA’s spies in the Ministry.

“I know,” Zacharias said wryly, “hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“So come back.” Justin took one of Anthony’s hands before he could start wringing them together. “Come back with us now. There’s so much we’ve yet to do. There’s…” He lowered his voice, “ _Gringotts_.”

Anthony didn’t care about Gringotts. He didn’t care about being back in the magical world at all. He cared about fixing the mistake he’d made: he would turn himself in, exonerate Zabini, and then he could go back to SOW and sit at a desk decrypting messages for however long the war lasted. Even better, he could disappear forever. Get a Muggle job. Spend his spare time in front of the telly.

“Okay.”

Anthony didn’t wait for them; he retrieved his wand and Apparated straight to the hill outside Hogsmeade. This ended here.

 

* * *

 

If this was to be the last time he saw this place, Anthony wanted to remember it in all its detail: the walk through the leaves, the smell of the vegetable garden before it came into sight, the not-quite-castle looming between the trees. It was only hitting him now that, in all the time he’d been coming here, he hadn’t once caught sight of Hogwarts itself. They were too far away, and that distance was not just of the tangible variety.

“You can relax,” Justin said. “You’re home.”

It was certainly someone’s home. Anthony said, “Not quite yet. I need to talk to Neville first. I don’t mind if you two come with me.”

Zacharias didn’t say anything; Anthony could tell that Zacharias knew what he was about to do, but not whether he approved of it.

They found Neville in a meeting room that Anthony hadn’t known existed. There was so much here he wouldn’t even have the chance to see; he tried not to think about it. Neville was sitting with Ginny and they were looking over a map; Ginny scrambled to fold it up, but Neville stopped her.

“Anthony,” he said. “It’s been a while. I had been hoping to consult further on the Gringotts matter before you disappeared.”

“Sorry about that. But I can explain everything.”

“Go on.”

“Ginny was right. There was a spy, and it was—it’s me.”

She got to her feet, raising her wand. Neville made no attempt to stop her.

“I knew it,” Ginny said. “I thought it had to be you. You were the new one on the mission. The new one in the organisation. We should never have trusted you.”

Neville said, “Ginny. Sit down.”

She did not.

Anthony opened his mouth, and it was a few dizzying moments before he could speak. “I’m telling you because I heard that Blaise Zabini was taken out of his position at the Ministry. I heard his wand was being tracked. I don’t know who fed you that information, but it’s not true, I’m sure of it. Zabini had nothing to do with the counterattack because those were my people.”

“And who are your people?” Neville asked. He was calm, and it was terrifying.

“The Muggle government,” Anthony said. “I work for a small group within MI5—er, that’s the home intelligence office. They’re—we’re called SOW. Special Operations: Wizarding. I was recruited while I was studying cryptography at Oxford. SOW needed someone to decrypt your messages, and I fit the bill. As a former member of Dumbledore’s Army, I was in the perfect position to infiltrate, so I did. I’m not proud of it. I just wanted to see all of you again. I wanted the chance to do _magic_ again.”

That was the full story. Now that Anthony had told it, it was like a burden being lifted from his back. He rolled his shoulders. He felt… not good, but better.

“Well,” Neville said, “thank you for filling in the missing pieces.”

In disconcerting synchronicity, Anthony, Ginny, and Zacharias all said some variation of, “What?”

“Oh,” Justin said, “maybe I can explain.”

Anthony turned to stare at him. Slowly, Ginny lowered her wand. Zacharias looked like he was about to kill someone; probably Justin.

“We knew you were spying on us, Anthony,” Justin said. He made it sound so casual. “I knew from the moment I saw you around Whitehall with a wand, though you couldn’t tell me where you got it. I guessed MI5, but I wasn’t certain, since we didn’t know they had a magical branch until… well, until now. Anyway, I spoke to Neville, and he instructed me to recruit you. We agreed it was for the best that we kept you close. That way, you only know what we want you to know.”

“So Malfoy Manor—” Ginny said.

“Yes, sorry about that,” Neville said. Ginny did not look ready to forgive him, not after all that Skele-Gro, but she listened as he explained: “Think of it like a test. We had to get a handle on the kind of information Anthony was passing on. And it didn’t really matter. Getting Malfoy Manor on the first of September would’ve been more symbolic than anything else.”

Anthony was still wrapping his head around this. “And Zabini?”

“We were lucky he showed up. Otherwise we might have had to expose you as the spy. This way, we had a neat excuse.”

“I fed you the story that his wand had been tracked on purpose,” Justin said. “I knew it would get you to come with us. I must say, though, I’m impressed; I didn’t think you’d confess so quickly!”

“You absolute fucking bastards,” Zacharias said. “I knew too, I worked out that Anthony was spying, and I protected him! You could have kept me in the loop. We would have avoided all of this.”

Justin elbowed him. “All spymasters are bastards. I would hope you’d worked that out, too.”

“So where does that leave me?” Anthony asked. If he had felt lighter when he turned himself in, now he felt so dangerously weightless he might float through the ceiling and into the treetops. He wanted to be nowhere at all. “I can’t stay here. I’ve betrayed you. I don’t know what SOW will do to me if I betray them.”

“Don’t wait around to find out,” Neville said. “You saw what happened to Percy. That was unfortunate… but know that the DA can always protect you. We’re an army, and we’re a family.”

“And I like to think I did a good job recruiting you,” Justin added. “Don’t let me down.”

“I could defect.”

Saying it out loud made it seem like a real possibility. A better option than sitting on the couch dipping crisps in ice cream, at the very least. If Anthony would truly be safe here, he wouldn’t need the SOW’s protection. He wouldn’t need their twisted encouragement, their spells for beginners, their hesitation to do something _real_.

“I will,” he said. “I’m yours.”

“I’ll accept that offer,” Ginny said. “But for the first month I want you under full surveillance at all times. I don’t want you to leave the Forest.”

“I left the telly on at home,” Anthony said, flushing red.

Neville waved a hand. “You can go home first. Get your affairs in order. Then come back, and—like Ginny said—don’t you dare leave.” He said it with a smile; Anthony was beginning to realise that this was what made Neville so dangerous.

“And if you prove yourself loyal,” Ginny said, “we might let you help us on our missions again.”

Zacharias said, “I told you, Anthony. I said you’d be good at it, and you were.”

“Apart from the whole telling the enemy about it beforehand thing,” he said. He could almost laugh about it now. Give it a month and he would. He couldn’t wait to find Michael, and Terry. He had such good news for them.

Along with Zacharias and Justin, he turned to leave. They were obstructed at the door by another trio: Hermione, Ron, and Harry Potter.

“Holy shit,” Anthony said. “Um, hi… ?”

Potter squinted at him a moment before recognition set in. “Oh! Anthony Goldstein. Bloody hell, how long’s it been?”

“Just about eight years.”

“Anthony’s working for us now,” Justin said proudly. “He’s helping with the Gringotts heist.”

“Fantastic, mate,” Potter said. “They’ve told you all about the Horcruxes? We’re almost certain there’s one at Gringotts. I think we’re doing a briefing on it tonight, right Hermione?” She nodded. Potter said, “Great, we’ll fill you in on the details then. See you later?”

Anthony felt like he’d walked through a passing tornado and out the other end with only a few hairs askew. “Yeah,” he said, “see you.”

Justin took his arm and dragged him down the corridor, and Zacharias slung an arm around his shoulders. As they walked away, to whatever came next, Anthony said, “Okay, what the fuck is a Horcrux?”

“No idea,” Zacharias said. “But it’s good to know MI5 won’t be getting their hands on this one, will they?”

No, Anthony thought. They wouldn’t.


End file.
